We are just a group of retired spooks that discuss things that you’ll not find anywhere else. It makes us unique. Take a look around. Learn a thing or two.
Well, my doctor has stated that I need to stay in the hospital for a week or longer. And then afterwards, I really have to be very moderate and calm in my activities. Apparently, I can trigger my blood pressure to launch towards the stars, and I need to tame that beast. So, this is MM going calm and serene.
Drinking is going to stifle for a spell. Same with smoking, and many of my favorite vices. Sigh.
Gotta be good, and lend myself to some serious chill.
…
I really get upset about the crazy relationship scene that the West has collapsed into. And this mix of rampant sexuality, free-lovin’ (not that I’m complain’) and isolationism with a woke political class is just another sign of a seriously collapsing Western society.
Men need love.
Women need understanding and compassion.
And let’s not forget about our kitties. Right?
Let’s all strive to be a tad better to ourselves, and to those around us. It’s so easy to get caught up, and ignore our very own needs and situation.
…
We need to chat about food. And stews are great Winter fare. (Unless you live down under) then I would recommend prawns. Stews are great, and I’ll guess that many readers haven’t had a home-made stew in some time. I suggest that you make up one and enjoy it.
With butter and bread.
Life is too short otherwise.
Today…
Cajun Meatball Stew
2023 11 10 09 45
Ingredients
Meatballs
1 pound ground round or chuck
1 1/2 cups soft bread crumbs (3 slices)
2 tablespoons each minced parsley and cold water
1/2 clove garlic, crushed
1 egg
1/4 teaspoon each cayenne and pepper
1/4 cup vegetable oil
4 green onions, trimmed and minced (save tops for gravy)
2 teaspoons salt
Gravy
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
5 cups cold water
4 envelopes or 4 teaspoons instant beef broth
1/4 teaspoon salt pinch of pepper
1/3 cup minced parsley
4 green onion tops, sliced thin
Meatball drippings plus vegetable oil to total 1/4 cup
Instructions
Meatballs
Combine beef, bread crumbs, green onions, parsley, garlic, egg, salt, cayenne, pepper and cold water in a medium size bowl. Mix lightly and shape into 24 balls. Place on tray and chill for 30 minutes.
Heat oil in large, heavy skillet and brown meatballs quickly on all sides (don’t overcook or the meatballs may toughen).
Drain on paper towels; save drippings.
Gravy
Place combined meatball drippings and vegetable oil in a large, heavy saucepan or skillet. Blend in flour, and heat and stir over moderately low heat until flour begins to brown, at least 10 to 15 minutes. Good Cajun cooks take about 45 minutes to make a roux. The roux should be a rich topaz brown.
Add water and instant beef broth gradually, whisking until thickened, about 5 minutes.
Add meatballs to gravy. Reduce heat to low and simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally for 45 minutes.
Taste for seasoning and add salt and pepper as needed.
Stir in parsley and green onion tops. Heat for 15 minutes longer.
Serve in soup bowls or on plates with the meatballs and gravy ladled over fluffy rice or egg noodles.
I’ve seen this question hundreds of times over the years on Quora and the knee-jerk answer is always some version of “Follow your passion is terrible advice.”
There was a time when I thought exactly that and wrote a similar answer. Sure, following your passion can lead you to become a starving artist or a passionate amateur beach volleyball player who lurches from one financial crisis to another.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have accountants under neon lights, droning through their days like robots, their life becoming a series of monthly, quarterly and annual closes.
image 10
Having been on both sides, I didn’t see a lot of difference in the happiness between those two groups.
My biggest advice is to “see the grey” and not take anyone’s career advice as a one-size-fits-all tip. Be like a CEO and take in differing perspectives of your VPs, and attach weights to each piece of advice given your own circumstances.
Don’t ever, ever, treat anyone’s advice as gospel. And that includes anything I say or write.
Hustle culture has spawned this nauseating obsession with meme-quotes from billionaires that supposedly solve all of our problems.
Spoiler alert: I don’t give a shit what Elon Musk said. He’s smart and capable. But he came up through a very narrow silo in the world. His circumstances are extreme and hardly applicable to most of our own. Hell, I’m half-convinced he’s a narcissistic sociopath.
You can do what you love. Or you can learn to love what you do. Life changes. New passions evolve and the economics of those passions make new paths possible while destroying old ones.
You may wake up one day and realize you hate the thing you thought you’d spend your life doing.
The only constant in success is hard work and focus.
The more I’ve accepted that life is a fluid situation, with everything in constant change, and given assumptions always being tested, the better I’ve done.
Work hard, stay flexible, and expect waves of upheaval. Because I promise those waves are coming. We all get our turns.
The first military tactic, and for thousands of years the most successful by far, was “stand together in a line and point our sharp sticks in the same direction.” Here’s the Sumerians doing it about 4500 years ago:
Proto-warfare involved individual fighters going essentially one-on-one with other individual fighters: think a modern gang fight or bar brawl. But you can’t really do that if the guy you are trying to fight has two guys immediately adjacent to him also holding spears: they’re going to stick you. If the guys in the line have shields and/or armor, you can’t even hang back and chuck shit at them, which was the other proto-warfare classic.
Now, this sounds really easy, but it turns out it actually isn’t. Warfare involves a bunch of people you hate trying to kill you. The natural response to that is to either (1) sensibly run away, or (2) run over and get the bastards first. Standing in a strict formation with even spacing is fairly unnatural in those circumstances: you need to practice it a lot, especially if you want to have any hope of moving.
(1) in particular is hard: even if you know that in theory your phalanx will survive a cavalry charge, it’s a harder sell when you have a couple thousand pounds of muscle and steel coming at you at a gallop. Gaps in your line means you are fucked: it’s hard to convey how absolutely shafted (pun intended) disordered infantry are in the face of cavalry, but it might be helpful to recall that the reason Napoleonic and Civil War soldiers stood in closely packed formation while getting mowed down by musket and cannon fire was because that was the safer alternative. And, to make things even more fun, the first guy to run away is probably going to be fine: he’s got all of his buddies holding them off. The last guy is going to get shishkebabed by a Gothic/Frankish/Norman/English lance, so how much do you trust your buddies?
(2) also isn’t actually easy to overcome, either. If you are a professional soldier, you might like the fighting. That’s how you get honor and, more importantly, loot. If it looks like you’re winning, you might really want to be the first person on the scene. You might make a lot of money. This is actually how the English lost at Hastings. The English housecarls, who were pros, successfully stood in a line with the pointy sticks the right way against a half dozen Norman charges, but broke when the Normans faked a retreat. They were then slaughtered.
But yeah, “get my guys in a line with sticks the right way” was sufficient for Alexander, the Romans, and Napoleon to get into the world conquest game. Simple, but that shit really works if you can actually do it. But you do need to actually do it.
We bought a building that previously had section 8 tenants. None paid on time, the very first month that we owned it. The housing authority didn’t pay either. After 8 phone calls spanning 3 weeks, during which time we had already given 3-day notices to pay, and filed for eviction, the housing authority finally called us back, asking what the heck we were doing evicting THEIR tenant.
We informed them that under state law, we were following the required procedure for eviction for non-payment. They told us that under the terms of the 17-page Section 8 Contract, we could not evict the tenant for any reason whatsoever, including non-payment. We asked why they didn’t pay us on time, and they replied because we had not signed the Section 8 Contract yet, after the purchase. Ah-Hah!
We then informed them that we would be proceeding with the eviction, and would not be signing the Section 8 Contract. They told us that the previous owner had already signed it, and it is not revocable! They then threatened us with legal action if we continued with the eviction.
We told them that we had already consulted our attorney, who told us it is illegal to enforce or coerce anyone into signing or upholding an agreement that they did not willingly enter into. Thus, upon the sale of the property, as clearly stated within the Section 8 Contract itself, and apparently unbeknownst to the Housing Authority, the new owner has a choice to enter into Section 8 or not. And, oh by the way, selling the property is the only way to get OUT of Section 8, and the only way to evict Section 8.
The Housing Authority huffed and puffed, and went away. The tenants were evicted.
End of Story. Yes, it is legal. We’ll never do Section 8 again, ever, for any reason whatsoever.
An articulate well known diplomat with high integrity and trust Wang Yi is meeting a 6 year old mindset, with Neocons drumming his voice with China hate and U.S. hubris thinking China is still in its 100 years of humiliation and the U.S. is still the one eye king after everyone loses both eyes after 2nd World war in 1945.
I hope for Blinken’s sake he will stop talking like the U.S. is the angel and China is the devil. He may think so but 180 out of 195 nations think it is the other way around. Best don’t even go there! Pretend to act civil and learn humility. That will go a long way Blinkyboy!
Confucian ethics says it is better to overestimate your opponent and underestimate yourself than the other way a around. The U.S. needs a lot of this balancing. China don’t listen to hot air after all. China sees more than hear. Anyone can say anything.
The U.S. better not talk about its own self made propaganda, lies, misinformation and fabrications. China is way too smart to let you lecture. Moreover the U.S. has done too much evil to even dare preach. Better focus on how to work with China on each others progress. Projects of common interest and goals to enrich the world, China and the U.S.
Without China the U.S. will die of pneumonia, with China it may suffer common influenza once in a while. Sure China will fly with the U.S. and still travelled at breakneck high speed rail without the U.S. but the faster China goes the more the U.S. will benefit too. If it knows humility.
We bought a house in a small California town, primarily because of our dogs. It had two and a half fenced acres, and was in a semi-rural area. Our dogs were getting old, and we wanted them to have a peaceful place so that they wouldn’t be stressed while we were at work. Well, it seemed like we bought a house in the “snob hill area.” During the first week we were there, a man stopped by our gate and informed me that our car was too old, and that we needed to get a new one. I told him that we were new to the area, and asked him to recommend a dealership. He did so, and I told him that I would meet him there the next morning, and to remember to bring his checkbook. For some strange reason, he hasn’t spoken to me again.
In the military, are you only allowed to keep on you what is issued to you by the government or can you buy extra protection if you want to? (knives, extra guns, extra supplies, etc), also, is your weapons and gear all new when you get them?
From a Navy perspective…
In the military, are you only allowed to keep on you what is issued to you by the government or can you buy extra protection if you want to? (knives, extra guns, extra supplies, etc)
Being on ships, there are some things you can and can’t have. No one, except a few watches, carries a gun on a regular basis. Generally, they’re issued out prior to watch, during security drills, or during actual events that threaten the security of the ship. Having a personal firearm onboard would have been useless, as it would always need to be locked up in the armory. There’d be no reason to have a personal firearm. The only people who MIGHT be allowed to have one would be the Commanding Officer, or a flag officer.
As for knives, I used to have one or two I carried everywhere while on ship. I was an engineer, and knives are essential, but not issued. I usually had a large Buck folding knife (I liked how they kept an edge), along with a small Swiss knife on my keychain. At one point I did have a double edged boot knife that I would keep hidden, specifically because they weren’t authorized. And only certain fixed blade knives were allowed (based on size).
Other types of gear we could go outside of regular issue were certain uniform items. When I was in, we had what were officially called “chukkas”, but which we all called “boondockers”.
These weren’t too bad, if they fit right, and they got more comfortable as they wore in, but they were about as mass produced as you could get, and the quality was inconsistent. They had steel toes that would cut through the inner lining and tear your toes apart, and a little saltwater would destroy the shine and eat the leather.
So, many of us would spend a small fortune on civilian shoes, much like these…
The Navy was fine with them, as long as they had steel toes and were black (for enlisted). They were supposed to be leather, too, but a lot of us would go for the ones that were synthetic, specifically because they were water proof.
There were other items that were not “issue”, but were sold as extras in the uniform shop. Back in the 80’s, there was a light black jacket we called the “Johnny Cash” (not to be confused with the black working uniform with the same nickname). If you ever went to certain overseas ports (generally Hong Kong), you could get your dress blues lined with an Asian motif embroidery on silk. This was out of sight for inspection, so the command never had a problem with them.
As for “extra equipment”, we sailors really didn’t need much more than what was already given us. We were allowed to bring on personal items, as long as they could be stowed properly. Electrical items always needed to be safety checked, and might need a request chit (permission slip) to bring it on board, but I usually had a computer for cruises, and game consoles were popular.
…also, is your weapons and gear all new when you get them?
This all depends.
Your primary issue for almost everything is in Boot Camp. That’s all your uniforms, toiletries, and other kits, such as sewing. These are always new, and upon issue, you have to identify your items with you name. In my time, we had a “stencil party”, which consisted of the entire company sitting down on the deck and using a machine cut stencil and special pens, we stenciled our names on everything.
I can literally smell the stencil ink as I write this. Not unpleasant, but strong.
From that point on, you’re responsible for replacing any items that aren’t up to standard. You get an annual allowance for this, and you can choose where to buy your gear.
I have broken service, and my uniforms weren’t in the best shape when I got back in. I was given an allowance that was meant to buy a new seabag (what we call our full set of uniforms), but I decided to save a little money and go “used”. There are always “boot drops”, the recruits who didn’t make the cut, and they have to return their uniforms. These were in good shape, but stenciled. We could buy our uniforms used, then cross out the old stencils and add our own. Saved about half what I would have paid for new.
Ships also have a lost and found, and those items are sometimes auctioned off for the welfare and rec fund. You could get some decent items from that.
As for weapons, well, you don’t keep your service weapon when you leave. Those are turned around and reissued. You might get new, you might get used.
The Evidence has been submitted and the case is closed
The Judgement has been delivered.
DEATH.
…
The MEA tried many times to help out but Qatar refused to comply
So there is no point discussing the evidence
We can go to the ICJ but given that Qatar is a gas lifeline to Europe, I am certain ICJ will pass
They openly bankroll the Hamas and yet not even a pinky finger has been pointed at them to this day
We need to get our boys out
That’s crucial
Now I am almost certain, the death sentence would not be carried out.
It never does
Except Eli Cohen and a handful of others, most spies are never killed or executed
Eventually there will be trade offs and exchanges
My guess is if India backs a Two State Solution in UN and votes against Israel for a cease fire and UN involvement in the Gaza conflict, that alone could secure a commutation to life imprisonment
Typically there could be a round robin exchange
Meaning a third country could mediate the release of hostages in exchange for India doing something for this third country
Like US or Russia or China
Ideally if we had a few Qataris in our Jail, we could do a swap
We don’t
Qatari tourists to India are non existent
We can’t pull out business contracts because we have only 6% and the Chinese would grin and happily take over
We can’t pull out of Oil and Gas contracts because we have no major long term deals and these are fungible goods
Of course they will, that is a a done deal, in fact they have already. Overtaking the U.S. is a piece of cake. A bunch of war monger selling stuffs no one one wants to buy at astronomical prices because they pay their greedy CEO 100 times that of China with workers that demand 10 times higher salaries working half the hours and insist 5 times more benefits!
Never mind this, the Yanks believed they can spend till thy kingdom come and spend like there is no tomorrow! China will pretend that they fear the U.S. but to the Chinese they not need to lift a finger, Uncle Sam will bankrupt it selves.! Hubris will bury them. Superiority complex will destroy themselves!
Let me help you hubris and racist Yanks understand the real world. As long as you still think the world belongs to you, the easier it is for us! China today in reality is at least twice bigger than you and that is being highly overestimating Uncle Sam and underestimating ourselves!
At the very worst., China is growing 5 times faster than you. The U.S. is totally fxxked! But we will pretend that the Chinese is 50 years behind the US! You loved that don’t you?
Embrace a lifestyle that costs only a fraction of your earnings.
Living below your means is like having a superhero cape you never have to show off. It’s the ultimate life hack for me, it makes one feel invincible, calm, and in control.
It’s likened to standing in a rock-solid tower while chaos swirls around you, that’s a feeling words won’t be able to capture.
In many places, especially in my home country, living modestly is more than just a money-saving trick; it’s a shield against life’s darker corners.
It keeps you off the radar for all sorts of unpleasant situations, from kidnappings for ransom to targeted robberies.
It also makes you less of a walking ATM for friends, family, and even strangers who see you as their personal bailout fund.
Choosing simplicity when you could go grand is a power move. It’s like having an invisible army guarding your peace. You’re not just scraping by; you’re flourishing but on your terms.
This lifestyle is the ultimate stress-buster. You’re cruising in a relatively comfort zone where you’ve got the choice but not the pressure to splurge. When you do spend, it feels like tossing a pebble into a pond, not like drilling a hole in a dam.
Living this way gives you access to a type of joy most people can’t even put into words, let alone experience in their lifetime.
Imagine being able to book a dream vacation or buy a dream home on a whim, leaving everyone around you stunned. That thrill is something money can buy only with a huge dose of discipline.
When you can comfortably afford your belongings, life takes on a different hue. You’re the boss, and everything you own is just a tool to make your life better, not a golden calf to be worshipped.
You only hurt one person, you, when you chose to live above your means. It is a recipe for sleepless nights and constant stress.
Being smart about how you live pays dividends in happiness and freedom, the very assets that are truly priceless.
There was a tall, lanky fellow who always wore long sleeves and sat down the table from me in engineering class. He didn’t talk much, had a strange sneeze and mostly kept to himself.
I had a sneaking suspicion he was smart, really smart. I shouldn’t have cared either way but between my bloodthirsty competitive side and penchant for people watching, my radar was always on.
And it wasn’t like I had any evidence, grades, test scores or even a remote conversation to draw my conclusion from.
All I had was a subtlety I’d noticed: His body language.
It was a cool confidence juxtaposed with a complete lack of stress on his face.
This absence of stress is not to be confused with slackery. He was laser focused on our material but rarely took notes. That pencil just sat by his hand begging for playing time, but no. Class didn’t seem to faze him. It was as if he was just in cruise control, coasting along while we all paddled to keep up.
He would go on to graduate first in his class.
But I had confirmation before that.
One day towards the end of the term, our teacher put a very high level problem on the board and asked who knew the answer. I immediately looked at him – he knew the answer. I could tell. His head sat still while his eyes were darting around waiting for someone to answer.
He was smart. He had it in his pocket. But he wasn’t looking for attention.
The teacher reiterated, “Anyone?”.
Finally, he slowly raised his hand and read off the answer like a trained assassin: calm, cold and collected.
You don’t need test scores to realize someone is smart.
Just watch them, it’s usually there. And it’s usually the quiet ones. Still waters run deeper.
China is TAKING OVER! Tiangong Space Station HUGE Update
Zero! Unless the US cancels all sanctions and restrictions it has placed on China. China is using the proceeds of its bond selling to buy gold. The expectation is that China will begin using gold backed currencies whether the Yuan or a BRICS currency. China sees the US headed for bankruptcy or at best, a financial and economic restructuring. So far, the US continues to print dollars and spending like there is no tomorrow, especially its spending on foreign wars. Yesterday, it was Ukraine, today it is Israel, tomorrow???
Schumer’s recap of his meeting with Xi has the tone that is as condescending of a lecture by an adult to a child. Here are all the points.
Point #1: At the foundation of our relationship must be a level playing field for American businesses and workers as well as responsible competition. We need reciprocity. That means allowing American companies to compete as freely in China as Chinese companies are able to compete in America. I made clear to President Xi that we do not believe there is a level playing field or reciprocity now.
Schumer is complaining about a level playing field? Reciprocity?
This is from a Congress and administration that has more than 1,200 Chinese tech companies on the Entity List and cried economic coercion when China placed restriction on one U.S. companiy. And he’s “making it clear to President Xi” that the U.S. wants a level playing field?
Point #2: “I raised the huge structural inequities and serious imbalances the U.S. faces in its economic and trade relationship with China. For decades, the Chinese government has erected significant barriers aimed at restricting the ability of American companies to compete in an open and fair manner in China. I made clear that the United States cannot sit idly by and that we must address the Chinese government’s forced technology transfers, theft of intellectual property, required joint ventures, and intimidation of U.S. businesses operating in China, among other troubling actions, that undermine economic reciprocity.
“Specifically, I also raised the need to remove restrictions and open up the Chinese market to U.S. companies, including from the semiconductor, financial services, and aerospace industries, and putting an end to policies that intimidate U.S. businesses operating in China.
What restrictions? What structural inequities?
Shouldn’t U.S. companies be making their own decisions on these? And as they say, the proof is in the pudding.
U.S. companies are making money in China. This is why they’re in China. It is precisely because of the structural benefits that China offers that U.S. companies are accepting the Chinese terms for doing business in China. U.S. companies can at any time decouple to India but are not because of the superior structural benefit China offers. And it is also why there is a “structural inequities” between the U.S. and China because, like India, we do have the infrastructure and manufacturing resources to compete with China’s. And this is not China’s fault. If the U.S. and India want to compete, then its incumbent on themselves to build the requisite “structure”.
Evidence of China’s open market? There’s Tesla in China’s automotive market and Apple in the mobile market, both market leaders in the world’s largest market. Nvidia was also the market leader in the world’s largest semiconductor market but its the U.S. banning them, not China.
Point #3: “Equally important to the need for reciprocity is the need for China to take more aggressive action to stop fentanyl from coming into America. Right now, the scourge of fentanyl is costing tens of thousands of lives and destroying American families. I called on President Xi to work with the United States to stem the flow of precursor chemicals that are fueling America’s fentanyl crisis.
And how exactly is China suppose to do this when precursor chemicals are not even banned substances in the U.S.? Fentanyl is a legal drug precribed by U.S. physicians for their patients.
Enforcement of illicit drugs is the sole responsibility of the U.S.. Blaming China is just a sorry excuse for failing at controlling an epidemic of our own making. It’s our greedy Pharmas in collusion with the FDA and physicians that promoted opioid use and solving this can only done by us alone.
Point #4: “I raised with President Xi the unfolding atrocities carried out against Israel and the need for the world community to stand together against terrorism and with the Israeli people, and pointedly requested from President Xi that the Chinese Foreign Minister strengthen their statement; they did.
Schumer is lecturing China on its foreign policy. He stressed the “unfolding atrocities” against Israel but omitted the greater “unfoldering atrocities” that the Israelis are committing against the Palestinians that he wants China to ignore.
Point #5: While we must ensure that our trade policies are fair, the United States will also prioritize our economic and national security, including protecting advanced technologies. Our delegation made clear that America is not seeking a confrontation with China, but we will remain steadfast in our commitment to promoting stability in the region, freedom, and democratic principles, and vigorously defend our values around the world.
This is just BS political talk. He’s saying that U.S. policies should be fair but justified when it’s not when we prioritize economic and national security, including protecting advanced technologies. So the U.S. subsidizing companies to the tune of $52 billion on building chip fab in the U.S. is ok but accusing China of doing the same subsidizing its tech companies as unfair and illegal trade practice. And its ok to sanction China from advanced chips and machines that make them – even forcing the Dutch, South Korean and Japanese companies to join – is justified for the sake of U.S. national security.
Now, how different would a Biden meeting with Xi be from Schumer’s? The Democrats has an election in 2024 and this will be nothing more than an electionering tactic at China bashing to win votes.
Radical Culture Change
Russia’s Top General: “Ready for Post-Conflict Negotiations”
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said today “Moscow is ready for negotiations on post-conflict resolution of the crisis in Ukraine and on further coexistence with the West.”
Russia knows Ukraine has lost. Russia knows the West can no longer provide weaponry or money to keep that conflict going. Russia knows it’s defense production is SEVEN TIMES GREATER than all the West combined. Yet, they are extending an olive branch.
Hal Turner Remarks —
We in the West should seize the moment and take this opportunity to move forward in peace.
Sadly, I fear the West simply CANNOT seek peace. I think the West – especially the United States — is literally Bankrupt. I believe the West **needs** a nuclear war or at least a partial nuclear war, so they can blame their financial collapse on the war. I perceive the West **needs** debt forgiveness and the only way they can get it is through mass destruction.
It seems to me the West needs to be able to go to their creditors and say “Our cities are destroyed, our people are dead, our economy is smashed. We have no hope at all of ever paying you back. We need debt forgiveness.”
If I am right, the Creditors, seeing this is the actual reality, will have little choice.
I suspect at that point, the very people in the West who perpetrated the massive financial destruction, get to walk away, free and clear, **remain in power ** (that’s the key) and start the whole shitshow all over again. Then, in maybe another 75 years, they have to do it all again. Round and round the wheel spins. Same old, same old.
If the West turns down this move for peace that Russia is offering, then ALL OF US know the whole Russia-Ukraine thing, and the whole Israel-Hamas thing, was specifically designed to intentionally CAUSE nuclear war for debt forgiveness.
Nothing else about these situations, makes any sense to me.
This is especially true of athletes in their mid and late 30s.
Men’s testosterone begins to decline around 30. We don’t recover as fast and lose a bit of our power over time. It’s a subtle change that catches up to them.
And many champions don’t know when to walk away in their prime.
Ronaldo is now sitting the bench on Manchester United:
True soccer fans knew this day was coming—as in fans who aren’t Ronaldo fanboys. He wasn’t playing at a high enough level to start on Manchester United. He was leaving the midfield too open while he camped out waiting to score goals.
He’s 37 and feeling his age. And that’s fine. Father Time catches up to everyone.
The sad truth is that this happens to the best of athletes. And it’s never more evident than in combat sports. Fighters that seem invincible, will go from being 31–1 to suddenly losing 8 of 10 fights in a row.
Muhammed Ali stuck around wayyyy too long and at least accelerated his mental decline.
Anderson Silva used to look untouchable. And then, age 38, he began a long losing streak.
Losing 6 of his last 8 fights.
The only person smart enough to walk away seems to be Khabib Nurgademedov. He was 29–0, and the allure of 30–0 whispered his name—but he stayed disciplined and knew to step away.
Meanwhile, his nemesis Conor McGregor has been racking up losses.
It’s a good metaphor for life.
Some phases of our life have an expiration date. Relationships. Jobs. Parties. And if you stick around too long, it just makes things worse.
The most dangerous creation of society is the man who has nothing to lose.
Today, at age 34 our combined net worth is $1.6M, not including equity in our home and equity in a small business my wife runs.
I can tell you our story, but it will probably bore you to sleep.
I had it in my head at the age of 25 that I wanted to be a millionaire in 15 years. So I sat down in front of a computer and opened up excel. I made a simple spreadsheet that assumed market returns of 7%. I then calculated how much we needed to save each year to obtain millionaire status by 40. We then proceeded to save the amount of money generated by the spreadsheet and invest in index funds, basing our lifestyle around the remaining income.
That is it.
Why did it happen sooner?
My wife hated her job. She was treated with very little respect by some members in the office, I suspect because she was young and good at her job. So she left. I told her to take some time for herself and figure out what she wanted to do. Little by little she began doing some book-keeping and tax work for former clients (she is an accountant). As word got around, more people called. She began networking and eventually built up a small accounting business with her and two employees. It’s humble, but we are able to save 100% of her earnings which helped us reach our goal sooner.
If you met me on the street you’d think I was a generic 30-something with all the same stresses of a corporate job, house and kids that most middle-class 30-somethings deal with. You’d probably assume I was barely getting by when you saw my dirty 14-year-old car, especially after you learned that I like to commute by bike most of the time anyway.
And that’s it. Having means is often more about your life style than your earnings. Unfortunately I’m not a savvy business man who made millions in his 20’s while driving a Ferrari and flying first class. I used a spreadsheet, saved that amount of money and built my lifestyle around that savings rate.
Then my wife and I woke up rich.
I told you it was a boring story.
Cajun Pork Chili
2023 11 10 09 48
Ingredients
2 pounds ground pork
2 large onions, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 sweet red bell pepper, chopped
1 sweet green bell pepper, chopped
3 stalks celery, chopped
1 (28 ounce) can tomatoes
1 (28 ounce) can kidney beans, drained
1/4 teaspoon hot pepper flakes
1 teaspoon dried oregano*
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Dash of hot pepper sauce
Salt and pepper
Instructions
In a heavy saucepan, cook the pork over medium heat, stirring to break up the meat, for about 5 minutes or until browned. Pour off the fat.
Add onions, and cook until tender.
Add garlic, red and green peppers and celery. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes or until vegetables are softened.
Add tomatoes, breaking them up with the back of a spoon.
Stir in kidney beans, hot pepper flakes, oregano, cayenne pepper, hot pepper sauce and salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil; reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes.
Notes
* If you prefer a more traditional chili flavor, use cumin instead of oregano, and add chili powder to taste.
My wife and I went to see the war movie “Saving Private Ryan” in IMAX…. it was super loud. My wife had even taken hearing protection, because it was so darn loud. When the movie ended she was taking out her ear plugs and said..
“Wow, that was so loud”
Now, there was an old dude sitting in front of us, and he said …
Most of the time, Chinese don’t think about Koreans.
When I have heard Chinese talk about Koreans, they talk about good entertainment and food, hard work, and often more hot-tempered than Chinese. But they do not say this in an uncomplimentary way; they just say that Koreans are usually more hot-tempered and emotional than Chinese in a matter-of-fact way.
Simply put, by doing a good job, right up to the last day. Here’s my story.
I wasn’t fired, but I was forced out. Over 17 years, I worked diligently for my boss. I started out as a laborer in this construction firm. I had completed a 2 year course on building construction, but back then, you did not get a degree for vocational education. I worked my way up to running jobs for him, as a job supervisor. Building one job, I set a record within the firm for the highest profit job. The boss that’s because he bid the job right. At the same time, we had 2 other identical jobs going, and they were both losing money. I replied that I made sure he managed to keep that money instead of running it poorly.
Fast forward a few years, and over the years, we had both grown tired of each other. Little things. The boss visibly checking his watch when I leave at 3:31, a minute after quitting, all the while ignoring I started 10 minutes early. For some reason, he tells me I can not run jobs for him anymore, claiming that the jobs he bids on, they want to see that his supervisors have a college degree. I’ll keep my pay and vacation, but I am maxed out as a carpenter, so don’t expect raise for the near future.
At first, this arrangement was actually quite nice. I kept my pay and benefits, but the stress levels associated with running a job went away. All of the newly hired college degreed supervisors love having me on their job. After 17 years, I knew what needed doing and how to do it, and was happy to do so. That Christmas, I specifically not invited to the company Christmas party, as only supervisors were invited. It used to be everyone when we had a small crew, or supervisors and key personnel (Long term hires, not the guy hired last week).
Later that spring, the boss tells everyone that times are tough, he won the bid on the job, but it was low, I need everyone to take a pay cut. Everyone else agrees to take a dollar cut. My turn in his office, he suggests a $3.00 cut in pay. I tell him I can not afford that, I’ll need to immediately start looking for a job. He replies, okay a dollar cut. And says that if everyone pulls together and produces, I can raise their pay back. So… my pay depends on all the now demoralized employees.
So, of course after a few more months, I am feeling hurt by the disrespect, and a job is offered to me, same pay, new company, one with some real character and class. I took the job, of course. The boss looks at me and says, you didn’t think that pay cut was permanent did you? I just looked at him. Two weeks later, I am working the next job and loving the working relationship.
After a couple months, I get a call from him, he tells me it was a mistake to let me go, he didn’t realize all I did for him and how well I did it, offers me a good paycheck and restoration of all benefits, etc… I reply that this job has different challenges that I want to prove myself on, and politely declined. His response, oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. A few months later, I receive a similar call from him, and it goes the same way, though he offers me a little more money. Again, politely declined. 2 years or so after leaving, I see a prominent ad in the help wanted section. He placed an ad in my new locale, describing my experience and capability to the letter, offering a company truck, commensurate pay, etc.. I did not respond. After 17 years of the little quibbles we had with each other, I had enough. I currently had a secure job and wanted to stay there.
TLDR, do a great job right up to your last day and make them regret making you leave.
Christopher Reeve was so much more than the characters he played.
He was exceptional, having hit the genetic lottery.
He was a brilliant student and an outstanding athlete. He was kind and oozed work ethic, pursuing perfection in everything he did. Christopher Reeve could have done anything he wanted in life.
Acting became his first and foremost love. He landed lead roles in nearly every audition from grade school onward.
A famous actress, Olympia Dukakis, approached him after a childhood performance, saying, “I am surprised. You’ve got a lot of talent. Don’t mess it up.”
He later frequented the most esteemed theater groups, including the Harvard Theater Company.
After being accepted to a list of Ivy League Schools, Chris attended Cornell, and later — Julliard.
He was adored by his theater teacher, John Houseman, who was eager to see Chris’s career blossom, saying, “Mr. Reeve. It is terribly important that you become a serious classical actor. Unless they offer you a shitload of money to do something else.”
The latter phrase came to be
After a stint of leading roles on Broadway, Chris landed the lead role in Superman in 1978. He went on to worldwide fame, appearing in famous films throughout the 1980s.
Chris lived a life most men dream of.
He made millions of dollars while starring in love scenes with beautiful starlets. He traveled the world, dining with Hollywood elites and noble laureates.
And then he met Dana
It was 1987. Dana Morosini was performing in a small-town cabaret.
Chris was always a fan of theater and was in attendance. Afterward, he walked into the backroom to meet her.
She’d fully expected to meet an arrogant jerk, as one often assumes of men in his position.
She said, “The man I met was soft-spoken, tall, kind, articulate, and not far removed from superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent.”
She was caught off guard by his interest in her. Chris said he’d just come back to compliment her, but later admitted he’d fallen in love with her in the moment he’d seen her.
She was initially skeptical, knowing it could all be a ruse to get her into the sack.
He later called her and she agreed to go out with him. She quickly fell in love and their relationship progressed. They moved in and lived together for several years. Then they married and had a child.
Theirs was always a good marriage, not prone to turbulence and strife and the two were known for their public affection. They traveled and went sailing while pursuing their own careers.
Eventually, horses came into the picture. Dana had grown up riding. In an effort to be part of that passion, Chris began taking lessons.
Like most things he did, he went all in. He wanted to be his absolute best. He rode and took lessons 4–5 days a week.
He went into jumping — a very dangerous style of horseback riding and was doing fine, despite taking an ambitious progression in the sport. It typically takes years to progress into big jumps.
May 27th, 1995
The most dangerous accidents are often subtle and less violent than a kick or explosion.
Gravity can do great damage with a little distance and a bad angle.
As Chris’s horse surged towards a wall to jump, it panicked and stopped, (called “refusing” in riding).
Chris was launched over the horse. He landed headfirst, all 6’4, 230 lbs of him. His second and third vertebrae in his neck were shattered.
Seven months prior, he’d filmed a movie where he played a paraplegic. He’d spent substantial time around people with spinal cord injuries in preparation for that role. Every day, he’d left their clinic feeling grateful for not living in their predicament.
And now he was there.
Life sputters to restart
Chris laid in the hospital, completely immobile and powerless. He was waiting to have surgery to reattach his skull to his spine. He couldn’t even lift his hand to brush his own teeth.
Most don’t realize what nearly happened in the weeks that followed.
Chris was in heated arguments with his doctors. He insisted they pull the plug on his breathing machine. It wasn’t a bluff. He couldn’t fathom living in his current state.
He saw himself as a burden to those around him. He was also threatening that he’d kill himself if they didn’t.
One can imagine, after a life of such freedom, being able to do anything you wanted, with a budget to pursue any passion, just how challenging it would be to suddenly be confined to such a cruel fate.
Dana Reeve became emotional and sat with him, saying, “I am only going to say this once. I will support whatever you want to do because this is your life and your decision. But I want you to know that I’ll be with you for the long haul, no matter what. You’re still you. And I love you.”¹
She urged him to just give it two years before they revisited the decision.
He accepted.
He eventually settled into his new life and Dana stood by her words, and by his side. They still lived, did things together, and found ways to have fun.
They were brought together by a push to make the world better for people like him, starting The Reeve Foundation, and raising money for people with spinal cord injuries.
He said during an Oprah interview: “We (humans) are all one big family. This has taught me a big lesson about complacency. We should never walk by someone in a wheelchair and be afraid of them — or think of them as a stranger. That could be us. In fact, it is us.”
Yet, it almost ended in that hospital room.
Chris couldn’t move a single body part below his neck. It was a far cry from his days as a free-roaming bachelor.
Yet he and Dana’s marriage was as strong in the second half as it had ever been before.
Sadly, Chris lost his life in 2004, due to complications from his injury. Shockingly, and only two years later, his wife Dana passed away from lung cancer. She was 47 years old and had never smoked.
Their story is terribly tragic. But within all of that pain, their love was consistent and they were happier than many others. It is yet another reminder, to embrace the moment and the blessing of good health.
The US government will destroy America’s semiconductor sector. Nvidia is the poster child of this event. It’s GPU semiconductors used in AI and cloud computing applications are a good example. At first, the US government stopped sales to the Chinese market of its 100 series chips, then Nvidia began a slower version in its 800 series chips. Now all Nvidia GPU chips are off limits to China. Not only that, but 21 countries suspected of reselling their purchases to China have been put on the entity list.
Talk about killing a company, Nvidia is a prime example of what is happening in the US semiconductor sector. The US is hell bent on denying semiconductors to the world’s biggest semiconductor market regardless of the damage.
Both TSMC and Intel have stopped work on their high end fabs because that market is fading away from them because of US restrictions. Intel and Qualcomm have established ‘innovation centers’ in mainland China and TSMC is trying to expand its Nanjing factory.
The US government is killing the very sector it thought its actions was meant to kill the Chinese semiconductor rise, only to find it is killing its own semiconductor industry.
When I was four, my father brought home this little white puppy for my sister. About a year and a half later, my mother got an orange tiger that became my cat. I loved that cat, and the cat and dog became fast friends, sleeping in the same bed together at times, and generally being the best of friends.
Starting in about fifth grade, I began to get really interested in retro TV shows like the Honeymmooners and Burns and Allen, and so many weekend nights I would fall asleep on the couch to those shows, either not going upstairs to my actual bed at all, or going to bed in the mmiddle of the night, at about three or four in the morning. Often enough I would let my cat in after he was outside for a few hours, as almost everybody who had cats at that time did; this was in the mid-seventies. He would make a kind of soft murr as he came in the door, and that’s how I knew he was in. That little white dog would be hanging out at his usual spot near the kitchen stove where his basket was, and the house would be at peace.
One cold winter night in February, when I was twelve, I got up to let my cat in. As usual, he did his usual murr, and I closed the door. Only this time the dog started growling and barking. Then I heard the sounds of a cat hissing. Then I heard the dog barking, and the noises of a cat and dog fighting. I couldn’t believe my ears because nothing like this had ever happened before. My cat and my sister’s dog were great friends so why was this happening? I was starting to realize that something was very, very wrong, and that there was probably a cat in our house that simply didn’t belong there. What else could explain the dog’s weird behavior? And by the way, what the hell was I gunna do now?
Well, what else could I do? I went upstairs to my parents room, opened the door and said:
“Ma? I think I let the wrong cat in.” See, I had figured out by this time that this other cat had followed mine into our house.
At that point, she and my brother came downstairs to see what was happening. As it turned out, quite a lot was going on because this cat and our dog were still fighting. And now my mother and brother were trying to get the damned cat out of the house. The cat was shrieking and hissing, flying around the kitchen, the dog was barking, and my mother couldn’t get her hands on the animal. My mother screamed at one point because the cat, quiet for a few seconds because it had tried to hide itself in a corner where we were storing insulation because my father was rebuilding our kitchen, screeched like a banshee when the cat sprung from his hiding place and attacked her.
Finally my cat, who had been paying no mind and eating his food in his bowl, finally got pissed off at the other cat and chased him out of the house. Then all was finally quiet, and we three all went upstairs to bed.
Meantime, my father, who was upstairs while all this was going on, got up to go to the bathroom, and he just started laughing his ass off. “It’s not funny!” I kept saying from my room, because by this time I was now in bed, and it was probably about 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. Of course, the more I said it, the more he laughed, and the more he laughed, the more I found it funny, so I started laughing.
Just one of those classic stories from my childhood. And I can still hear my father remembering that story and repeating my words in the exact sheepish tone I used that night:
There was the time I helped a teenage girl run away from home. I hid her in my room, lied to my parents, and ditched school. And for years I was completely embarassed by it. That just wasn’t appropriate behavior.
Here’s the story. When I was about 17, I started dating this girl who was a year younger than me. She complained about her mom a lot. Hey, we were teenagers, we all complained about our parents — but as I listened to her, it started to sound like there was some real emotional abuse going on. One night she called me, and we talked for hours. At one point her cat came in; he was a bloody mess, apparently he’d been in a fight, and for her this was the last straw. She was in quite an emotional state as she cleaned up her cat and then told me, “I’m coming over. I need to be with you tonight.”
It was 2 AM and I knew my parents would not appreciate a girl showing up at our house at two o’clock in the morning. I told her no, but she insisted. She said she was going to ride her bike over and that was it, goodbye.
What could I do? I didn’t want her ringing the doorbell, so I went downstairs and checked on my parents — they slept on the first floor, my room was upstairs. They were sound asleep, so I eased the back door open quietly and waited for her.
She showed up, dropped her bike in the back yard, and headed for the door. Before I stopped her, she threw the door open . . . and the dog started barking.
Oh crap, I’d forgotten about the dog. I shoved her up the stairs and followed her up, telling her, “stay up here and BE QUIET!”
Then I came downstairs, just as if I had been awakened by the barking and was trying to figure out what was going on. My parents were stumbling out of bed also. My mom noticed the back door was open and there was a bicycle in the yard. Obviously, someone had broken into the house — but where was the intruder? Dad headed to check the garage and I offered to check upstairs. Naturally, none of us reported finding an intruder, and they assumed that the intruder had been frightened by the dog and fled on foot. Mom brought the bike into the garage and was going to call the police — but I said “If we call the police they won’t be here for another hour and we’re all tired. Why don’t we call them in the morning?” They agreed that this was the best idea and they went back to bed.
Upstairs, girlfriend was crying. She was trapped, couldn’t go back downstairs for fear of the dog barking again. Couldn’t get her bike out of the garage without my parents noticing. I said “You’ll just have to stay here till morning.”
“My mom will kill me!”
At this point I said. “You’ve been telling me how much you hate your mom and how you’d really like to run away. Now’s your chance.”
“Huh?”
“Stay here tonight, and tomorrow we’ll see what your legal rights are.” She agreed and we fell asleep.
The next morning I came down for breakfast. Naturally, my parents were still talking about the incident in the night. I volunteered to call the police. I picked up the phone, dialed Time and Temperature, and listened to the National Weather Service’s local weather forecast while making up an entire imaginary conversation with the police department. I told my parents, “They said they’ll be here in an hour or an hour and a half. Why don’t you guys go to work, I don’t have school till third period today anyway, I can talk to them when they get here.” They said I was a good, considerate son, and went off to work.
By the way — I don’t think I’d ever lied to my parents before. At least not since I was little. I was a terrible liar, and I don’t know how I was able to do it so convincingly, thinking on my feet with the pressure on. Of all the things in this story, lying to my parents is probably the thing I’m the most ashamed of.
They went to work and Jeannie came downstairs for breakfast. I called an adult friend, an attorney, and told him the situation. He said that if I really thought that there was abuse going on, that I should report it to the District Attorney. So I called the District Attorney’s office and made an appointment for Jeannie to meet with them that afternoon. We arranged to meet at school and I would drive her downtown, but at the moment she needed to get her bike out of my parent’s garage. She rode off to school and I would later tell my parents that the police impounded it.
When I got to school myself — late, I’d lied to my parents about not having to go to first or second period that day — I was met in the hallway by my English teacher, Mr. Nelson. His first words weren’t rebuke or admonishment. Instead he said, “You’ve been seeing Jeanne M—-, haven’t you?” Cautiously I admitted it, and he said with near-frantic concern. “Do you have any idea where she is? Her mom thinks she’s been kidnapped, there was blood in the bathroom and she’s missing.”
Blood? Oh, yeah, the cat was bleeding when he came home that night and Jeannie cleaned him up. So I told Mr. Nelson that Jeannie had been with me, and he said Jeannie’s mother was on the way and I needed to go to the principal’s office to straighten things out.
When I got to the principal’s office several things happened all at once. The principal greeted me (I was kind of a teacher’s pet, and he insisted I wasn’t in any trouble). Jeanne just arrived on her bicycle and was coming down the hall from the other direction — and in the front door was walking Jeannie’s mom.
Jeanne gave me a hug, right in front of the principal, saw her mom, and panicked. “Oh My God, Run!” she yelled, grabbed me by the hand, and started running like she was trying to save her life. I followed as best as I could, and behind us, her mother was keeping up with us, cursing and making dire threats against us.
We went down a couple of back corridors of the school and into the student parking lot. We got into my car and peeled rubber getting out of there, leaving Jeannie’s mom out of breath and swearing.
We spent the next hour driving around, hiding from Jeannie’s mom or anyone else looking for us, then went downtown where we told someone from the District Attorney’s Office what was going on. They asked Jeannie to go in for further questioning and evaluation and told me to go back to school.
I went directly to the principal’s office. I told the principal about Jeannie’s claims of abuse — he didn’t act surprised — and that I’d dropped her off at the District Attorney’s office. He just told me to go to class and I never got into any trouble for what I did, not even for missing several classes that day.
Jeanne called me that night to tell me she’d been put in foster care and had been placed with a family that lived in the East High district so she’d still be going to school, and the DA was investigating the situation. But I never did find out how it all worked out, because not too long afterward, Jeannie and I had a big fight and we broke up.
In the years that followed, I was ashamed of the role I’d played in the whole affair. I was a good student, not a troublemaker, the teachers and parents all liked me, I was a Christian kid, active in church and my youth group, not the kind of person to help minors run away from home or hide girls in my room or lie to my parents. As the years went by I was ashamed and embarrassed by the whole thing and didn’t talk about it.
Then one day, 40 years later, I started wondering about some of the people I knew in high school and started looking them up on social media. I found Jeanne. Since I’d known her she’d become a registered nurse, gotten married, had a kid, gotten divorced, and lived alone with a couple of cats. Nothing too extraordinary there.
Then I found a blog post she wrote, entitled “The Day My Life Changed.” She wrote about years of emotional abuse recieved from her angry single mother, the cursing and threats and insults. “You’re nothing but a worthless slut,” she was told over and over, and ever since she was little she just wanted to make the abuse end. She wanted to run away — but was never able to do it “until one night a brave boyfriend said he’d help.” She ran away, got into foster care, and a family that convinced her that she wasn’t worthless after all — decided to go to nursing school and make a life for herself.
“Brave boyfriend.” I’d never thought of myself like that before. For years, I’d been ashamed and embarrassed about what I d done, only to find out that I was the hero in someone else’s story.
Yes I contacted Jean after that, and we stay in touch by Facebook.
Cajun Cheeseburger
cajun cheeseburger
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1/2 pound ground beef
1/2 pound ground pork
2 tablespoons onion, finely chopped
2 tablespoons green pepper, chopped
1/2 teaspoon dried, crushed basil
1/2 to 3/4 teaspoon ground red pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
4 slices Wisconsin Cheddar cheese
4 hamburger buns, toasted
4 tomato slices
1/4 cup green onion slices
Instructions
Combine beef, pork, chopped onion, green pepper and seasonings; mix well. Shape into four patties. Cook and top with cheddar as directed below.
Place patties on oiled grill over medium coals (coals will be glowing). Grill, uncovered, for 5 minutes on each side to desired doneness.
Top each with Cheddar; continue grilling until cheese is melted. Place each patty on bun. Top with tomato; sprinkle with green onion.
I think it is inappropriate to say “China helps African countries”.
I have many business partners in China who are very interested when it comes to Africa. For the Chinese, Africa is a friendly business partner. Rather than “a beggar in need.”
There is a story circulating among the Chinese.
An Italian salesman went to Africa to sell shoes and found that Africans did not wear shoes at all. He returned to his country depressed and told his boss: “Boss, they can’t afford shoes at all. So our shoes can’t be sold.”
A Chinese salesman went to Africa to sell shoes and found that Africans did not wear shoes at all. He returned to his country excitedly and told his boss: “Boss, they don’t have shoes. Africa has huge market potential!”
Maybe you think that Africans can’t afford Chinese shoes, and that the Chinese are just being crazy. But the Chinese don’t think so.
There is a Chinese proverb, “Don’t bully a young man into being poor.” It roughly means: Don’t despise a person just because he is poor, but see his future.
In the eyes of the Chinese, although Africa is poor, it has huge potential. It doesn’t matter if you can’t afford shoes, I know rubber is abundant here. You can make soles out of rubber and sell them to me, and I will use them to produce shoes. Now that you have earned money, can’t you buy my shoes? You guys get nice shoes, I get cheap rubber, everyone is happy, isn’t that good?
What? You can only get rubber juice and don’t know how to make soles? It doesn’t matter, how about building a rubber factory and a shoe sole factory? No funds? Not technical?
It doesn’t matter, just wait for me to make a call.
Soon, rubber experts, equipment suppliers, and sole designers from China arrived. Chinese bankers came too, and they even gave better loans than the IMF, with only factories and future profits as collateral.
A year later, a modern rubber factory was built. Millions of shoe soles, gloves, and even tires are produced every year. Thousands of people found jobs here, and they began to have money to buy food, new clothes, and new shoes.
Salesmen in China found that their shoes were in short supply and all the shoes were sold. And the Italian salesman was still thinking about why Africans couldn’t afford shoes.
in this whole game
1. Africans got a modern factory.
2. Thousands of Africans around have received job opportunities. They have all made money, acquired new skills, and their lives have improved.
3. The tax revenue of the local government has been greatly increased. The income from selling rubber products is ten times more than that from selling rubber juice. There began to be money to build roads, schools, and hospitals.
4. China’s investment banks received dividends from the factory.
5. Chinese equipment suppliers sold equipment.
6. Experts who go to Africa to teach technology are paid a lot of money.
7. All the salesman’s shoes have been sold.
Who loses? There are no losers here
Is China helping Africa? No, China is just doing business their way, and Africans are just their customers. They deal fairly with each other and do not need charity or mercy.
Only some Western media are shouting: “Oh no! The Chinese are plundering Africa’s rubber. This is neocolonialism!”
They have completely forgotten how they did it 100 years ago.
Americans have a tendency to talk with their “outside voice”, even when inside and in a place where quiet is expected.
Americans have a tendency to mistreat people like store clerks, fast food workers, and hotel clerks.
Americans appear to have a perverse sense of pride about (1) how little they know about Canada (2) what they think they know about Canada that’s absolutely wrong, and (3) how large Canada is. Americans tend to treat Canada as if it were the size of Rhode Island rather than it being a little larger than their own country.
Americans are sure all their stuff is better than all our stuff, and when you point out how wrong that is in any area and provide demonstrable proof, they still won’t believe it.
Americans call our currency “funny money” because it’s plastic and all the bills have different colours. That’s despite the fact that American counterfeit currency is quite common and Canadian counterfeit currency is pretty rare solely because of its design.
A few months ago, I received an email from my daughter’s school informing me about the tragic passing of a girl. She had taken her own life.
She was only 14! She should have had her whole life ahead of her to do anything she wanted, but she couldn’t anymore because she chose death. The school email didn’t provide details about the reasons behind her action, but through the conversation with my daughter, I discovered that she had been battling depression. She felt overwhelmed by how she looked and the hurtful comments some other kids made about her. Sadly, some of her peers even viewed her actions as brave.
While I felt so sorry for the girl and her family, I felt compelled to remind my daughter a lesson I had always emphasized: “Everything can be fixed, except death. Taking your own life is not an act of bravery. Why? Because dying is easy. Living is hard. You only die just once but you have to live every day.”
I told my daughter, if anyone ever hurt you, do not hurt yourself, just come home to me, I will make you dinner, we will have dinner together, and if necessary, we will go out there and hunt the enemy that hurt you together.
Teenagers, please remember: Everything, every mistakes can be fixed, except death. If you ever don’t know where to go, go home!
And parents, please please, tell your kids that they can talk to you about anything, they can always come HOME. Please don’t assume that they know. Just tell them, by words, sincerely.
Some background: I was a costume designer for many years. My life was all about color. I dated someone who didn’t have basic color knowledge. Most frustratingly, he didn’t know common color names: Magenta, aqua, salmon lemon yellow. Could have been Greek to him. It was a source of humor between us, like we were speaking different languages.
Call him Steve.
One day we were discussing how and when we had learned color names, and had a bizarre revelation. I realized I had learned all my basic color names from Crayola crayons (note for young Quorans: they used to have the traditional color names, instead of creative new names). I started asking my friends, and all of them said that yes, the Crayola 64 pack (or was it a 120 pack? The biggest one.) was where they first learned their basic colors.
Steve, it turned out, never had Crayolas. His parents only got him the little 8 packs of generic colors. Red, green, blue, yellow, brown, orange, black, purple.
My poor disadvantaged baby! Of course we started making up for lost time. He would ask me what color I called something, then he’d tell me what he thought it was. Like lovers from foreign countries learning each other’s languages.
Anyway…. Came my birthday, and he gave me a gift I will never forget. It was a little book he had made by stapling sheets of paper together down the middle. On the cover it said “Crayola-Steve Dictionary” Inside, on each page, were two columns. One had each of the crayola colors drawn on the paper, with its name. Opposite it was the color that Steve had grown up thinking that name referred to.
I have never in my life had someone put so much effort and caring into a gift.
Years later, when Crayola betrayed the artists of the world by changing their color names to updated and exciting things, so that kids could no longer learn their color basics from the product, he hunted down a pack of the originals for me.
He was a very special guy, and I will always remember that gift fondly.
ADDED: For those who are interested, here you can see the change in color names in 1990…art teachers, I warn you, have a stiff drink in hand…
When I walked up on an employee berating a very nice regular customer. Actually, called this sweet little old lady a very offensive name (you f’king ole b***h). Her offence? She asked him a question as he was stocking some items. I fired him right there on the spot in front of her. Told him to get his things and get out and I would be mailing him his last paycheck as I never wanted to see his face again.
What is this problem with people painting cats blue?
I was fed up with the crap at a place that I was working and interviewed for a job that was opening up at a new place. My boss had been driving 50 miles each way. The new company was opening a place down the highway from his house, cutting it to 12 miles. They offered more money, more decency, better products and overall better working conditions. When I interviewed, they hired me on the spot and asked if I knew of anyone else who would like to work for them that they could talk to. I set up interviews for my whole team before I even told them about it, then badgered them into going. I told them they could say no at any point and I’d never say that they interviewed at all. We all went. We got better jobs closer to our homes. We got better working conditions. We got more money.
Once upon a time in a far away place, there was a party called the Republican party that believed in fiscal restraint and cutting taxes as the way to win the hearts and minds of the American people and to transfer ever more wealth to the rich in America.
This policy was ingrained and enshrined in their thinking with the greatest avatar being the B grade actor Ronald Reagan. Reagan coined phrases like Morning in America and went around Washington having huge balls and a wonderful time. Jobs started to disappear and the Midwest became the ‘rust belt’ but Reagan slashed taxes for the rich, ran up the deficit and left it for Bush Sr to fix it which he could not as he was right when he called it, ‘voodoo economics’.
This let in Bill Clinton who worked with Newt of Gingrich fame and they balanced the budget and all was well as the country bled ever more jobs but it was don’t worry be happy. Remember that one?
But Bush Jr of hanging chad fame, became President, cut more taxes, had 2 wars at a trillion $ or so and the country was back on the debt cycle as 3 million more jobs went to China. The ‘oughts’ were the worst for the American worker and best for American rich in a century until it all collapsed in a big heap.
Bush left the US in the Great Recession, crashed the economy and left it to neophyte Obama to fix. Obama dawdled along, saved the auto industry and put through an expensive healthcare plan nicknamed Obamacare and after 8 years and the hubris of HRC another Republican, this time a 5 time bankrupt tv huckster, Donald Trump came in with the same old same old.
Cut more taxes but then he decided he didn’t care about budgets. Thus the story ended with yet another $7 trillion added in debt as every Republican President that was a tax hawk / cutter has added more and more trillions to the national debt.
Trump did something else and is the reason for this story, he ended the Republican party. It no longer is a governing party, it is now the party of the angry disaffected types who will vote for him even though he admits he lost the 2020 election and tried to steal it. They love it, his minions now run the House, the Speaker was a leader in the steal the election saga.
A Christian theocracy is now spoken of openly and history is being rewritten by the GOP to move the US to a religious based society run by evangelical GOP Christians where women have no rights any more and elimination of LGBTQ rights including the right to marry will be taken away.
The GOP no longer stands for cutting taxes for the rich, that has already been done. Now they want to destroy and dismantle the federal government and take rights away from those they do not like including black and brown people who are being gerrymandered out in state after red state.
To cut the power of the feds and give it to the states so that the states will devour each other in a free for all. The GOP no longer stands for anything other than chaos.
You don’t have to look far, the new Speaker’s first proposal for Israel was to partially defund the IRS so that the rich don’t have to worry about being audited.
In the end, the GOP now stands for chaos, tearing down the system, cutting taxes and screwing everyone including the military and making themselves the white masters of an evangelical Christian society where they have all the rights and will tell you what to read, what to think and what history will be taught.
I’ve heard men say the only reason they ever befriend a woman is because they want to get their dicks wet. I believe those men. They have no reason to lie, and I see no evidence that runs counter to what they say.
Those men? No, they probably should not. Not just because they’ll cheat if they can, but because they see women as basically a life support system for a vagina, and what kind of friend is that? Their friendship will always and forever be transactional, because at the end of the day they don’t see women as people.
Normal men? Yes, normal men should have friends outside their marriage. Including friends who are women.
Yes. Out for dinner with my wife, I ordered a budget-friendly red called Leaping Horse or something similar. Or, more accurately, that’s what I meant to order. Instead, I treated us to a $200 bottle of Stag’s Leap at five times the price of the other horsey brand I thought I ordered. Stag’s Leap wasn’t even on the official wine list.
To be fair, the server questioned it and double checked that was what I wanted. Each time I foolishly said yes.
The US Navy doesn’t try to minimize discomfort. Safety? Sure. Discomfort? Suck it up Shippy!.
Racks, Navy-speak for the bunks sailors sleep in, have straps. Typically we keep them tucked under the mattress. But when needed we can pull them out and snap hook the to the top of the rack frame. This prevents you from rolling out of your rack.
I have used the straps on a few occasions and they do in fact work well. During a trek from Norfolk to Pascagoula back in the mid-90’s aboard a Burke-class guided missile destroyer, we ran into a group of storms near Key West. This area is notorious for bad weather that pops up on short notice. The area is littered with wrecks from the Age of Sail all the way to the 20th Century. White Squalls in particular are some of the most dangerous and infamous. We happened upon what the Commanding Officer would later tell us the Coast Guard had determined was a White Squall. When it began I was actually on the bridge standing watch. We were taking heavy listing rolls and heaving up and down fairly steeply. There is a list gauge and pitch gauge on the bridge. The heaviest roll we noted was about 32 degrees which is fairly close to Burke-classes mast limit.
We posted garbage bags in passageway and at strategic points. Many guys got sick. I felt horrible but I didn’t throw up. That may have been because I simply couldn’t eat after it started. As I was leaving watch and heading to the Mess Decks for Mid-Rats or Midnight Rations, I could smell vomit. The hour or so beating we took while I was on watch had me dizzy and swaying. Even when the ship wasn’t rocking, I was. By the time I made it to eat everything was secured as ordered by the CO. At that moment the CO came over the 1MC (loudspeaker), which was a big deal because it was past TAPS and no announcements are normally made. “Everyone not on watch strap into your racks”. Engineering watch crew set about “Setting Condition YOLK” which closes a lot of doors on the ship along with ventilation. The gun mount was turn as far aft as possible and depressed (pointed down) as much as possible.
The next day it was very calm to start. Then all of the sudden a storm formed and hit quickly during dinner. The rolls approached 40 degrees. We nosed into one wave an it submerged the bow. The waves that hit the bridge smacked the windows hard enough that it broke several windshield wipers. The storm hit while dinner was being served. The salad bar, which was tack-welded to the deck broke free and sent the contents everywhere. At the time the boat deck and our complement of 2 RHIB boats were my assigned space and responsibility along with one of my comrades. Both of us had to go out on deck to make sure the boats were secured. That was fun. We got to the quarterdeck and an area in the open that we have to cross with nothing to hold on to. Just at we were crossing the open area the ship heeled an rocked heavy to starboard ( the boat deck is on starboard). We were standing straight up but looking straight down at the water. It was intense.
There is also a stanchion/wire system we can rig for the Focsle (bow). They screw into the deck and stand about 6 foot tall. Wearing a harness you can strap onto the wire. Although rigging it when the seas are already rough is problematic. You can also just take the top caps and screw them into the deck, attaching the wire.
Years ago, my then-GF had a friend who periodically hung out with us.
Her friend was in a fairly turbulent relationship with her boyfriend.
It wasn’t abusive or anything. It just wasn’t meant to be. They couldn’t agree on anything in life.
Honestly, I dreaded hanging out with them.
They typically were showing up when we were going out on the weekends.
I knew that when they drank, it only exacerbated their problems and they’d start arguing.
And look, I’m not knocking either of them for their dysfunction. They were both young, not in full control of their emotions. They definitely weren’t prepared for their own incompatibility.
These things happen. We live. We grow. We learn.
Eventually, he came to realize that they were stuck in a rut they would never get out of. He broke things off with her.
She did NOT take it well.
Within a couple weeks she had moved away.
She took something with her though – his child. She was pregnant and chose not to tell him. It was a savage, vindictive thing to do.
Years later, he found out through back channels about it.
He was rightfully pissed. And it turned into huge drama.
Some of the friends in our group knew about him having a daughter and didn’t say anything to him. (Thankfully I didn’t know.)
He had to take her to court to get access to his daughter. And he did get visitation rights eventually.
But it sucked. He’d missed 5 years of his daughter’s life and hadn’t met her until then.
I can’t imagine introducing myself to my 5-year-old daughter, but these things happen.
He and the mother found a way into an agreeable arrangement of co-parenting.
And, he found a way to bury his resentment towards her for the sake of the child, which couldn’t have been easy.
But it was a valuable sacrifice because in the end it benefited the most important person in the equation, his daughter.
But I hate seeing kids getting caught in these evil games adults play with each other.
Due to a wiring harness issue, my father parked his 1965 impala SS in the garage 2002 and there it sat until 2022 when we had to move it. Rather than calling a tow truck I figured what the hell l, let’s give it a shot. We put a battery in it, pumped the gas a few times, a lot and behold l, it started right up after 30 seconds of cranking. Granted it ran like crap but it did run and stayed running with 20 years old gas. At first I was shocked that the gas was still good. Then I realized that it was likely the fact that the gas was 20 years old that made it start fine. This gas was pre-ethanol.
Now all we need to do is finish the wiring harness replacement
No I don’t. I was 12 when I had my first set of twins. My father had raped me for almost 2 years, and I didn’t know about abortion then. I was a child who was forced into having sex, and procreate, against my will. I still managed to graduate early, and find a good man to love, but I’ll never be able to get that innocence or childhood back.
You want the good news or the bad news. Let me feed you the good news first. Not yet! Chinese, Russian or a combination of this that faced the U.S. excesses hasn’t reached the point that it wants to take out the U.S. in spite of the U.S. provocation and goaded behaviour.
But it might if the U.S. don’t recognised the red line and push and push and push. At some point it may have no choice. And now the bad news. The U.S. has lost its ability to act without repercussions. Up to 2000 these countries might not have the capability to take out the U.S. but by 2023 they certainly can. And absolutely could do so it push comes to shove.
My worry is that the U.S. might not recognises or in denial that those nations can and will do it if they are push into the corner. There lies the risk of a catastrophic disaster first of the U.S. demise and or worst the U.S. nuclear respond and of course China and Russia respond to the U.S. nuclear response. It is a dooms day scenario for our world.
When I first moved to Boston, I had zero money. I was 18, working for minimum wage, and supporting my own crappy little basement studio apartment which took half of my take-home pay every month. I saved up to shop at Goodwill.
Dressed in my best ragged torn-off shorts and a gingham halter top, I wandered into John Lewis, an expensive jeweller on Newbury Street. The smell alone told me I was out of my price range–there’s just a smell to really high-end stores.
I was bedazzled. No other word for it. They had totally gorgeous stuff in their showcases, and I lusted after every item. The clerk asked me quite cordially if she could show me something. I told her that I frankly couldn’t afford to breathe their air. Her response made a difference in my life.
She said that maybe I couldn’t afford their stuff now, but maybe one day I could. She showed me everything! Shelet me try on everything. To me, Macy’s was higher class than I felt I could enter, OK? An expensive Newbury Street merchant making me welcome? This was beyond belief!
They had a set of 18k gold jewelry, all custom-made, hand-carved in a strawberry pattern that I fell in love with.
Eventually I tore myself away, a dream planted in my heart. Twelve years later, when I actually had a little money, I bought a custom ring in that strawberry pattern from them. It cost about $2000, and after a couple of fittings I wore it continuously for 30 years.
If that lady, who knew for a fact that she couldn’t sell me anything that day, hadn’t been so wonderful, I’d never have entered that shop again. Her kindness made all the difference.
China don’t pander to millionaires and billionaires rogue and irresponsible business leaders who took advantage and hurt the Chinese people. US calls it too big to fail companies. China take them to task. The U.S. bailed them out using taxpayers money.
What do I think?
I think China is responsible, is doing the right thing, is making businessman think of serving their customers better. I think the U.S. should learn from China. That is what I think! What about you? What do you think?
Gave Cheating Wife a Taste of Her Own Medicine: She didn’t expect to see my revenge…
China will do whatever is necessary to the interest of China and the Chinese people and that include Taiwan, China. Taiwan is an island and a region of China. It is an unalienable part of China. It cannot be separated or snagged away from China by any means including the U.S. and western geopolitical games.
As a Chinese origin from the southern China where 90% of Taiwanese Chinese migrated from. I understand their psyche that most westerners who write such ridiculous question can ever understand. We want to see Taiwan as an integral part of China. Many Taiwanese are all out to support and help China achieved this honourable achievement.
Do we gives a shit about what white Caucasian westerners think or feel? Not at all. Not even bothered a bit. We care about keeping our nation together from the manipulative western behaviour. Forceful or peaceful it our god damn business. It is our Business not yours. Mind you own business.
As Prof Zhang Weiwei likes to say, China is no longer on the same track as the West.
She’s now running on her own track.
This is like what I tell my medical students — don’t compete with others, just do the best that you can do (in your own way that works best for you).
image 2
Edit 17 October 2023:
As a Chinese, I see China as still being more deeply Confucianist than Communist; though there’s some overlap between the two ideologies. The sworn goals of a Confucianist society are two: xiaokang 小康 (moderate prosperity — which China has largely achieved), and finally datong 大同 (Great Unity
, a classical Chinese concept for an utopian view of the world; or Common Prosperity).
This is very different from the approach of the Western nations, seeking hegemony over other nations.
“The report to the 20th CPC National Congress in 2022 drew a great blueprint for rejuvenating the Chinese nation on all fronts by pioneering a uniquely Chinese path to modernization, and pointed out that striving to build a global community of shared future is one of the intrinsic requirements of Chinesemodernization, affirming the close bond between the future of China and the future of all humanity.”
Whether you believe the report or not — just watch what China had been doing (in Asia, Middle East, Africa and South America), and is continuing to do in the coming years.
Edit 18 October 2023:
China is holding her Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation (BRF) on 17–18 October 2023.
image 1
Attending the event are more than 1,200 representatives from more than 80 countries and regions
The list of VIP attendants is impressive, showing how China’s Belt and Road Initiative (2023 is its 10th anniversary) has attracted the attention of most countries (except those in US and her allies):
Vladimir Putin is top of the list.
Others: Indonesian President Joko Widodo,
Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev,
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban,
Chilean President Gabriel Boric,
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic,
Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev,
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed
Papua New Guinean Prime Minister James Marape
UN Secretary-General António Guterres,
Argentine President Alberto Fernandez,
Vietnamese President Vo Van Thuong,
President of Mongolia Ukhnaa Khurelsukh
Prime Minister of Mozambique Adriano Maleiane
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Anwar-ul-Haq Kakar,
Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin,
Kenyan President William Ruto,
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet,
Lao President Thongloun Sisoulith,
Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe
President of the Republic of the Congo Denis Sassou Nguesso
It looks like many other countries have been attracted by China’s parallel track, and are leaving “the American track”.
Alpha Hubby Allowed Me To Open My Marriage Then Filed For Divorce & Ghosted, Left Broke & Penniless
I’m a former New Yorker. I’ve only visited Canada, but lived in London for the past 25 years. In the States, if you have a good job, you can live very comfortably. But if you have a serious medical emergency or long term medical needs, this can bankrupt you, you can lose your home & be very poor. For average workers, the medical insurance is very difficult as the insurance is very expensive and on top of that, you have to co-pay. And many can’t get insurance because of pre-existing issues. In the UK, medical care is free, doesn’t matter about your past history … the taxes we pay towards it is less than what people pay in the States for their insurance. People never have to worry about being homeless because of ongoing medical problems. Whenever I go back to New York to visit, I’m a bit shocked at how very poor many people are there – compared to London.
In the UK, if you are working, but not able to afford rent, the government will pay towards your rent. It may not cover all the rent, but it helps. If you have children & don’t earn enough in your job, the government will top up your earnings so you are above the poverty line. If you are unemployed, your unemployment benefits won’t stop as long as you are actively looking for work & attending the skills meetings. And if you do accept a job, but it doesn’t pay well, the government will top it up to make sure you are earning what they consider to be the minimum needed to live on.
My high-earning son had the opportunity to work for his company in the States, but he realised he has a much better safety net here in the UK for his family. It felt too much of a risk for him to have to pay for medical insurance for his family when it isn’t even guaranteed that it will pay for certain things.
The only thing I don’t like about living in the UK is the weather. But everything else, in my personal opinion, leads for a better quality of life.
So, I’m on the beach enjoying myself over a bit of beach calligraphy (this involves cutting sand out of the surface, and some fairly intense concentration) when the spell is broken by someone who has walked up to me, having walked over my work, stood on it at my side, and proceeded to ask me what I’m trying to catch.
The next time that happened to me I was ready with “Calligraphy” as my reply but then just dumbstruck again by being asked if I had permission.
image 12
EDIT I just want to add the following in response to some of the comments I’ve had here:
I’ve NEVER had a child walk up to one of my doodles without noticing it and being curious about it. I do occasionally have young children deliberately tread through it but that’s part of being observant. It feels interesting underfoot. The interaction usually leads to my offering the tools to the kiddiewinks to try.
I can’t help wondering if there’s a relationship between stupidity and being unobservant. I’m not sure but it’s clear that coming with a strong preconception does get in the way of open observation and surprise. Only an adult can come blinded by so much preconception that they fail to notice the beach calligraphy happening before their eyes and under their feet. To then layer that blindness with a preoccupation with permission …?! I make no apologies for my disdain.
There are some lighting conditions under which the beach calligraphy is barely noticeable and almost impossible to photograph: high sun, lit from behind the observer, very cloudy. The beach calligraphy depends on shadow. I’m very keenly aware of this. Usually, under conditions like that, I’m just practising close to the waters’ edge where it is constantly washed away in any case.
If I have to do a paid commission then I get careful and a bit possessive about it and I look for a spot on a beach where I can be alone. I don’t usually mind redoing work. I often redo it in any case just because I’m not satisfied with the calligraphy.
You can lose your work to a wave, dogs, or an unobservant idiot but you don’t lose the skill you build in doing it again.
Some people have said things along the lines of “You don’t own the beach!” and I do (very rarely) get that response on the beach if I try to ward someone off my work. It’s a stupid response because this is not about ownership. Stupidity, on the other hand … if you’re not prepared to own it, it will own you.
I was in a courtroom trying to evict a tenant, I was broke had massive loans on the property and down on my luck, I could not afford legal representation so I represented myself which judges generally do not like. I saw the judge wipe the floor and throw out of court room the others who represented themselves earlier that day. This was the days before the internet and I had to learn about housing laws from things called books if you remember what they are? Then it was my turn to step into the dock after four hours of waiting in the court during previous, I learned a lot about tenancy laws in those four hours.
Preliminaries over then the game was on, its was like a verbal tennis match on points of law, I knew I had my paperwork and facts right, he volleyed and I hit it back countering his serve. Forgive me because this was over thirty years ago so I don’t remember the joust word for word, the judge did not like this uneducated smart arsed whippersnaper giving as good as-he got.
Then he threw a curve ball question regarding arrears, and how much the tenant owed, I said the tenant was six months behind I wasn’t sure of the amount as it was irrelevant, I had not come to court to claim arrears ( separate application and hearing and nigh on impossible to get money back because she was claiming benefits ) I said to the judge I just want her evicted and my property back. Then he tried to bamboozle me with jargon after jargon and I got a bit confused he then said to me said to me,
‘Young man I suggest you get your paper work in order and go and see legal advice!’
I was so nervous and that is exactly what I didn’t want the hear, as it meant I would have to have my property repossessed and I would have lost everything I worked for, I was sweating profusely my mind was over revving I was trying to grasp at something I had read in the past six months that would get me out of this painful situation
Then it came to me, I knew that I had done everything right and that he had to grant me a notice to evict, from deep within my memory I recalled something and blurted out to the judge, your honour under section ( blah ) article ( blah) of the 1988 housing act I have served you all the correct papers within procedure and you are obliged to give me notice of eviction, that was it, my final serve I had nothing else to give.
The court went silent and the court usher gave a wry smile, the Judge turned and looked down his nose through his half rimmed glasses at me and stared for a moment, then he turned to the court clerk and beckoned him over, he whispered something in his ear and the clerk disappeared for a moment and brought back one of the biggest books I’d ever seen laid it in front of the judge and opened it for him. The judge flicked through the pages and ran his finger down the lines of one or two pages as he was reading, he then grabbed the gavel looked at me and brought the gavel down with a thud and said
‘ Notice of eviction granted, 28 days’
It may not seem much, but there is nothing better (to me ) than beating the system that’s so inherently wrong and stacked against you but the biggest victory was correcting a judge on a point of law, when I left the court house I felt twenty kilos lighter and like had just been set free from , I did get my property back 28 days later
‘If you don’t fight you never win, if you fight there is a chance you may win’
Muffuletta Sandwiches
In New Orleans the two best Muffuletta Sandwiches — bar none — can be had at Central Grocery or at Napoleon House on Chartres Street.
muffuletta3
Yield: 1 loaf bread; 1 to 4 servings, depending on appetite! about 3 quarts olive salad
Ingredients
Muffuletta Bread
1 cup warm water (110 degrees F)
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 package active dry yeast (about 1 tablespoon)
About 3 cups bread flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons vegetable shortening
Sesame seeds
Olive Salad
1 (32 ounce) jar pimento-stuffed green olives, chopped
2 cups pitted ripe olives, chopped
1 1/4 cups chopped pickled cocktail olives
2 celery stalks, finely chopped
2 cups blanched chopped cauliflower
1/4 cup minced garlic
2 medium carrots, peeled and minced
2 teaspoons dried leaf oregano
1 tablespoon minced flat-leaf parsley
2/3 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
Muffuletta Sandwich
1 (10 inch) Muffuletta Bread loaf
3 ounces honey ham, thinly sliced
3 ounces Mortadella with pistachios, thinly sliced
3 ounces Genoa salami, very thinly sliced
1 heaping cup Olive Salad
5 slices Provolone cheese
Instructions
Muffuletta Bread
In a 2 cup glass measuring cup, combine water and sugar.
Stir in yeast. Let stand until foamy, 5 to 10 minutes.
In a food processor fitted with the steel blade, combine 3 cups flour, salt and shortening. Add yeast mixture. Process until dough forms a ball, about 5 seconds. Stop machine; check consistency of dough. It should be smooth and satiny. If dough is too dry, add more warm water, 1 tablespoon at a time, processing just until blended. If dough is too sticky, add more flour, 1 or 2 tablespoons at a time, processing just until blended. Process for 20 seconds to knead.
Lightly oil a large bowl, swirling to coat bottom and sides. Place dough in oiled bowl; turn to coat all sides. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm, draft-free place until doubled in bulk, about 1 1/2 hours.
Lightly grease a baking sheet. When dough has doubled in bulk, punch down dough; turn out onto a lightly floured surface. Form dough into a round loaf about 10 inches in diameter; place on greased baking sheet. Sprinkle top of loaf with sesame seeds; press seeds gently into surface of loaf. Cover very loosely with plastic wrap; let rise until almost doubled in bulk, 1 hour.
Place rack in center of oven. Heat oven to 425 degrees F. Remove plastic wrap.
Bake loaf in center of preheated oven for 10 minutes.
Reduce heat to 375 degrees F; bake for 25 minutes. The loaf is done when it sounds hollow when tapped on bottom. Cool completely on a rack before slicing.
Olive Salad
Combine all ingredients in a large bowl and stir to blend well.
Store in jars with tight-fitting lids in the refrigerator.
Muffuletta Sandwich
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Cut bread in half crosswise to form a sandwich bun. Layer the honey ham on the bottom of the loaf. Next add the Mortadella, then the salami. Spread the Olive Salad over the meats evenly. Top with the slices of Provolone cheese and place the top on the sandwich. Press down to compress slightly. Wrap the sandwich in foil and bake for 20 minutes, or until the cheese has begun to melt into the Olive Salad.
Slice sandwich into 4 quarters. Use wooden picks to secure layers, if desired; remove picks before eating.
Notes
Not only can you use this Olive Salad as a dressing for a Muffuletta Sandwich, it also makes a delicious addition to tossed green salads, pizzas, and is a great relish to spread on crackers.
They Don’t Want Coffee Dates, They Only Want The $1000 Restaurant
Now, I don’t want ANYONE bitching and moaning that I am presenting art for scuzy-ball males to drool over. Ok? Art is something that I love, and while my tastes in art are out of the mainstream, it is not a reflection of my thoughts, but rather of my emotions.
How not to love a good set of heartwarming illustrations?
Pascal Campion comes up with artworks that some of us will relate to. Like that time in your childhood when you would hangout with your buddies and explore the neighborhood… or that time when it was really snowy/rainy when you would sit by the window and think about life.
That’s the beauty of Pascal’s work… it’s really relatable, and it brings a sense of saudade (in portuguese, it’s a sense of missing things that might have happened or not, a kind of nostalgia). These are some fine examples of art with a sentiment.
All of these Earth-shattering events have really eaten up my time and had to; and forced me, to put important articles / posts on the “back-burner”. Here, in this article, we are going to explore the beauty of art. Oh, don’t give me that look. Art is wonderful and stupendous. And I happen to treasure it.
I hope you enjoy this article as much as I enjoyed putting it together.
South Korea is full of talented artists, and Myeong-Minho is one of them. This man is slowly but surely taking over the hearts of people all over the internet with his beautiful drawings. And after looking at them, you might feel the beauty of falling in love yourself.
Myeong-Minho draws cozy, intimate daily moments of a cute couple’s lives – from cooking, napping together, to travel.
The cat that can be seen in most of Myeong drawing ideas is inspired by his real-life cat Dorim.
But the art is about family.
And it is about relationships.
It is about feelings.
And it is about community.
“Dorim has a lot of charm and playfulness like a puppy,” illustrator wrote on his Instagram.
“He is really cute and pretty, except for his hand and claws.”
Myeong-Minho adopted the kitten when in the early fall of 2016, a woman came to him when he was drawing near The Dorimcheon river and asked him to hold the cat for a few minutes but then disappeared.
And so the kitten left in the artist’s hands.
Myeong-Minho is an amazing illustrator whose warm and cute drawings are worth the praise and recognition, so take a look at some of his creations below.
And so let me present this…
And this…
And so let me present this…
And this…
And so let me present this…
This too…
And so let me present this…
And this…
Yes. So many beautiful prints.
Ah, it’s only the “tip of the iceberg”.
Here’s one about COVID…
So many drawings to select from.
This is only a small sampling.
Imagine these prints all over your home…
Looks like paradise? It’s reality. If you allow it.
If you allow these images in your life, they will manifest for you.
Understand the power of thought.
It bends your reality and changes it.
It’s quantum physics 101.
To understand how to control your life, you have to realize this basic principle.
Thought is everything.
Control your thoughts and you control your life.
How do you feel after looking at all these drawings?
Do you feel sad? Gloomy? Or, do you feel positive and hopeful?
Whatever your age, and whatever your situation, I promise you that there is a GREAT life waiting for you.
Whether alone with a sunshine monkey daughter…
Or getting old and grouchy…
We all have some traits that define us in a good way. Embrace them.
You deserve it. You really, really do.
The art is about a boy and a girl falling in love.
Then, they get married and set up a home.
Then, they have a child.
And a kitty cat.
And another child.
And then they grow old together.
The art carries me away to happy times.
And I hope, that it carries you also to good places and happy times.
Have a wonderful day!
Do you want more?
I have more posts like this in my (underutilized, and rarely visited) Art Index. Please go there to see some more beauty…
The Italian fashion house Valentino bought advertising from a cat Stepan aged 13 that lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine. The pet posed next to the bag that cost 4 000 euros.
I personally believe that his expression encompasses the feeling of many an MM reader, and survivor in the total and complete fiasco that is, don’t you know, this planet earth.
Stepan is a celebrity cat. On most of its photos, it sits in a chair and looks thoughtfully at cocktails. People call the cat “the king of sad parties”. But the owner of the cat says it is not sad, it’s sleepy.
As he looks on dreamily at the wine, we can most certainly relate to his feelings, emotions and needs.
In ancient Greece a host at a dinner party would always take the first sip of wine to assure guests the wine was not poisoned and that is where the saying “drinking to one’s health.” comes from!
Stepan also got attention from Britney Spears who wrote in her Instagram…
“If I go quiet from time to time, you can catch me with this cat somewhere 😜😹🤪 !!!!”
I guess Britney understands.
Wine tasters call the smell of a young wine an “aroma” while a more mature bottle of wine has a “bouquet.”
This darn cat communicates so friggin’ well.
Let’s talk about wine.
Wine and life
There are 2 types of people: Those who drink wine and those I hate so much I scratch!
I know…
… many MM readers are American and really don’t drink alcohol, nor smoke. It’s mandated by the government and enforced by laws and society. So most Americans believe that it’s their choice. You know, for a healthier life, and all that.
Well, I live in Zhuhai which is next door to Macau.
Life expectancy for men in the USA is 70 years. (HERE)
Life expectancy for men in Macau is 84.2 years. (HERE)
Yuppur!
Cigarette smoking, alcohol guzzling Macau, China has a life expectancy much larger than that for America. I’ll bet you all weren’t aware of it.
“Wine improves with age. The older I get, the better I like it!”
Like all things USA, good news out of China is suppressed, while bad news is promoted with loud megaphones. Video 7MB
The banning of alcohol and cigarettes in the USA has more to do with control than any health reason. And if you cannot see that, then you are deluded. Just like in ancient Rome.
Back in the days of Early Roman (194 B.C) women were forbidden to drink wine, in fact, it was so illegal that any husband who found his wife drinking wine was free to kill her without fear of reprisal!
It’s about lifestyle. Stress. Family. Tradition.
You simply cannot try to change your recreational habits, while living in an oppressive, tyrannical environment full of stress, personal distress and bad unhealthy food. You just can’t.
Anyway…
…here we will chat about cats and wine.
You got a problem with that?
”99% of the world's problems could be solved with a glass of wine! Or 2,3 half a bottle.”
I sometime lurk in and around wine lover blogs, and extracted this treasure trove of information…
What Are The Most Popular Types of Wine?
You know, guys, wine is very, VERY versatile. It can taste like sweet liquid candy, all the way to oily melted butter and everything in between. It’s sort of like how there are all sorts of colas, and sodas. In fact, I will go as far is to say that there are more different flavors and tastes in wine than there are for beer. If you can believe that!
Want to find out what wine you like best?
Check out just 18 different grape varieties, commonly referred to as international varieties.
They include light sweet white wines like Moscato and Riesling to deep dark red wines like Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon.
Once you’ve tried all 18, you’ll actually have a pretty good handle on the entire range of wine. You’ll also know more about your personal preferences.
Knowing that Italy, France and Spain are the top three wine producing countries (as determined by the European council of wine) in the world tells you three things.
For one, they probably produce the majority of bulk wine in the world. Two, they also produce some of the best wine in the world. And three, France, Italy and Spain are the source of all of the most popular varieties of wine in the world.
But that has been a changing.
There’s some most excellent wine out of Chile, and Australian wines are outstanding, and let’s not forget Chinese wines. So, while the European wines are the oldest and best established, and thus they are considered the “most popular”, they are in fact no longer.
By bulk of wine produced, nothing can compete against the Chinese wine industry.
“Come on! It is not like I have a problem, I only drink a glass or 2 in days ending in ‘Y'”
Now that you know what wine is and where it comes from, find out what are the basic characteristics of wine? And no, I’m not talking about color, or bottle size.
Some wines taste tart. The tartness of wine is called acidity.
Some wines will warm/burn the back of your throat, which is the alcohol level.
Finally, some wines leave a lingering bitter/dry taste in your mouth, which is called tannin. Learn the basic wine characteristics, so you can better describe what you like.
In the wine world, we call this trait fruit forward.
How is it that a completely dry (ie no residual sugar) wine can taste sweeter than other wines?
There are a few factors that go into this phenomenon including grape variety, region and oak aging. For instance, if you have a Malbec from France compared to a Malbec from Argentina, the latter tastes sweeter.
The region where the grapes grow greatly affects the flavor.
The oldest bottle of wine in the World is located in Speyer, Germany, inside one of two Roman sarcophaguses and it is said to date back to A.D. 325!
Now that you’ve tried some wine and have opinions, how do you communicate to others what you like? Well, it helps to know what regions or varieties that you prefer, but what if there’s a better way?
For me, I just sample different budget wines and try them. If the price is right, and they taste good, I buy ten or so cases.
A little cat.
Look Like a Badass When You Drink Socially
A wine glass by uniform form has a gently curved rim at the top to help contain the aromas in the glass, as a general rule the thinner the glass and the finer the rim, the better the glass!
Wine is social. Learn about basic social wine etiquette. It will help you maintain cool and calm, even in the most intense dining situations… say, dinner at Per Se?
The best place to store wine is under the stairs! The worst place is usually in the kitchen because it is typically too warm or the fridge because they are too cold.
I suggest any time, all day. The more, the merrier.
Happy feline.
But seriously, though. 90% of wine is meant to be drunk in the year it’s released. This is a fact.
Some wines do, however, improve with age.
Want to know the traits of an age-worthy wine? There are four traits: Acidity, Tannin, Low Alcohol and Residual Sugar. Not what you thought eh?
If a wine tastes watery or is said to taste “diluted.” then the chances are good that it was picked during a rainstorm! And thus no grape farm worth its salt would pick them during rain, the hottest, sunniest days are apparently best.
Does this ever happen to you? You find a stupid-awesome wine and you buy a ton of it.
Eventually you drink up your stash and buy more, except the new wine doesn’t taste the way you remember.
Relax. You’re not crazy.
Formal.
Check the vintage, more than likely you’re a victim of Vintage Variation. Vintage variation happens more often in cooler climate regions. So if you’re a Pinot Noir lover, pay attention to vintage.
Those amazing deals on fantastic wines; either declassified, relabeled or sold through a stressful 3-day sale site. Yes, some of these deals are great, but you can still find great wines without a discount tag.
What a cute little glass of wine!
How much should you expect to spend on a decent bottle?
And if you’re buying in a restaurant, how much does that bottle of wine really cost?
Which is why I find a good wine and buy in bulk for my daily bottle or three.
Drinking Wine is an Adventure
A study in Italy argues that women who drink at least two glasses of wine a day on average have much better sex than those who don’t drink at all!
Well…
There’s only one way to find out if this study has merit and their conclusions are true. Don’t you know?
If you’re drinking the same old crap just to get drunk then you’re not really enjoying all the uniqueness wine has to offer.
Wine is an accompaniment to life experiences; where you are, and who you’re with.
There will always be peaks and valleys.
Expand your understanding by being experimental and trying new things. If you ask a wine expert what their favorite wine is, they’ll never give you a straight answer because the truth is, they love it all.
Here’s a nice look at some of the meals that my mother used to make for us kids when we were young. And we will also chat some about family meals eaten together.
I can tell you, with my first-hand experience that as we grew up and moved away from home, these delicious home cooked meals were replaced by fast food, and restaurant set meals. In truth, for decades I lived off of a mixture of fast food, easy to prepare cheap foods at home (spaghetti, hamburger, chicken) and restaurant staples.
I argue that many people still live this kind of pitiful life; not getting to live a life filled with delicious and tasty, healthy food.
This article looks at what my family used to cook for me that no longer exists in the diets of most Americans today. How many families in America today have sit-down family meals with lamb-chops, fresh fish, or a rump roast?
I personally beleive that once you start taking the time to eat well planned, healthy meals at home, your life and your families lives will become better and greater in every way possible.
The Real Benefit of Family Dinners
The importance of regular family dinners has been a hot topic in the world of sociology and family studies, and you’ve probably seen many articles these last few years touting their benefits. It’s been argued that family dinners do everything from decrease obesity to lower your children’s risk for teen pregnancy, crime, and drug use. It seemed as though family dinners were a silver bullet in preventing your kids from becoming deadbeats, and a failure to regularly sup together pretty much destined your child for a life on skid-row.
However, when researchers recently took a closer look at the supposed benefits of family dinners, what they found was that a lot of them could be chalked up to correlation rather than causation. That is, parents who had a strong marriage, better relationships with their kids, and set more guidelines for them, were more likely to have family dinners, and more likely to have well-adjusted children. It is these other factors, rather than the dinners themselves, that account for this effect.
The study’s authors concluded that while family dinners alone won’t prevent your kids from turning into cigarette smoking, teen mom juvies, the ritual can serve as a valuable part of a set of family habits, routines, and practices that contribute to a child’s overall well-being.
One clear benefit of family dinners that they found held up, even when controlling for the other factors, was a significant reduction in adolescent depression.
So consider family dinners to be another tool in your goal of building a positive family culture.
Their real benefit is the chance they provide for your family to slow down, get together face-to-face, talk without distractions, cement your values, create a feeling of support, and build loving bonds.
These benefits accrue to families who not only try to regularly have dinner (or another meal) together, but who approach these chances to break bread in an intentional way.
Let’s look at some of the tasty reasons why dinners whould be cooked at home.
Bacon-Wrapped Pork Tenderloin
Bacon-Wrapped Pork Tenderloin.
Roasts have existed for centuries, but the simplest versions are often to be the best. This double pork combo features a rich and luscious tenderloin wrapped in crispy, salty bacon that will leave your mouth watering. Just make sure to cook up some extra portions, as you know everyone will want seconds of this classic dish.
Stews have existed through time as some of the most durable, family-favorite dinners.
This recipe allows you to whip up a pot of this classic dish that could feed an army and explore the original flavors that made stew such an appealing dinner.
By adding in some dumplings, you can guarantee this meal will stick to your ribs and keep you well-fed.
Instant Pot Pot Roast and Potatoes
Instant Pot Pot Roast and Potatoes.
Instant Pots have been a kitchen blessing, and they can make cooking classic recipes a whole lot easier.
This quick and easy pot roast will make you see this dish in a new light and fill in any craving you have for a meat-and-potatoes meal. After just one bite, you might find your new weekday meal.
I must tell youse guys that I ate a lot of this when I was growing up. Pot roasts were my absolute favorite, and I just loved the potates, and we ate them with a full salad, at least two vegitable sides and a pile of sliced bread. Good eating, and long neglected.
Instant Pot Pot Roast and Potatoes.
Boneless Leg of Lamb with Parsley Mint Chimichurri
Boneless Leg of Lamb with Parsley Mint Chimichurri.
This retro recipe takes a twist on the classic lamb and mint jelly formula by turning the jelly into a mint chimichurri. This recipe is sophisticated enough to serve at any dinner party and can be easy enough to make any day of the week. If you haven’t given lamb a shot, this should be your gateway in.
Boneless Leg of Lamb with Parsley Mint Chimichurri.
Double-Crust Chicken Pot Pie
Double-Crust Chicken Pot Pie.
Pot pies are instant classics, but very few home cooks tend to make them these days. Why not explore the past with this classic recipe that takes all the flavors of this vintage dish and makes it easy to fix up at home?
This easy-to-concoct meal is a great way to start more comfortable working with pastries, and if you don’t feel confident in your abilities, you can use store-bought dough to save some time.
Double-Crust Chicken Pot Pie.
Corned Beef Hash
Corned Beef Hash.
You may have seen canned corned beef hash for sale at stores or watched your grandparents eat it, but nothing compares to making it at home. With one bite, you’ll remember why this dish became such a staple that has survived through the years. Just make sure to pace yourself, as you’ll want to gobble everything you make up in one go.
Herb-Crusted Grilled Lamb Chops
Herb-Crusted Grilled Lamb Chops.
Rediscover why lamb chops were such a hit by grilling up the perfect lamb with an herb crust that could please any palate. The deep flavor combinations can’t compare to any other boring lamb you’ve had in the past, and the herbs liven up this retro dish for the new era.
I have to tell youse guys, I really ate well as a kid. What the Hell went so wrong? My mother really knew how to cook and budget great meals for us kids. But then, somehow, I ended up living off of spaghetti and hamburger. Man, oh man!
Herb-Crusted Grilled Lamb Chops.
But the kids don’t want to sit at supper…
Well, then your family must be too far gone.
And you are just a limp-wristed pale shadow of a parent. You must provide rules, and guidelines and routines. Your children will grow to respect them, and after a month, they will learn to love them.
Ugh.
Sounds like me. So don’t get too offended. I’m talking about myself here.
Electronic media is a terrible seduction.
How to get the kids “on board”…
Yeah. It’s tough to pry them away from games, social media, and movies. But here’s some (lame) idea to get them interested.
[1] Teach them how to prepare their favorite food, and make a meal out of it. Then you make it formal and strat the ritualization of it.
[2] When you make their favorite food, make sure it is always formalized and ritualized. Make it special. There are different ways to make it special. Everyone is different. When I lived in the monastery, there was a bell that was rung. But it could be anything that fits your life, and your home.
[3] Always have delicious desserts. Let the children know that after they eat, they will have a very tasty dessert.
[4] Kids are easily distracted. So make sure that all distractions are switched to “off”.
How to Get the Most Out of Family Meal Times
Ritual. Strive for consistency. Try to make family dinner a sacrosanct ritual. Whenever you can, schedule your work and activities around this immovable block. Sometimes very busy high-powered executives will come home from work, eat dinner with the family, and then go back to work later. They do what they can not to miss it.
What’s great about prioritizing family dinners is that it gives you a goal to shoot for. If you know the wife and kids won’t be sitting down together and will just be fending for themselves, it’s tempting to rationalize continuing to plow through your work. But if you’re expected to be at the table, it’s easier to break away from what you’re doing and get home.
Don’t beat yourself up if you have to forgo your family dinner sometimes. Research indicates that children who have dinner with their family atleast three times a week enjoy the benefits of family dinners. So just try to be as consistent with it as you can.
Any meal will do. It doesn’t actually have to be dinner. Many families today have schedules that make it hard to get everyone home for dinnertime. Dad or Mom works late, and one kid has soccer practice at 6PM while the other kid has a piano recital on the other side of town at 7. It only gets worse as the kids get older. I remember when I got into high school, I was barely ever home for family dinner due to football, work, or student council.
Sometimes the solution is a much-needed simplification of our schedules, but it’s just not always possible to get everyone to the table at 6:00. Because of this, many families simply give up altogether on the idea of regularly sharing a meal.
But research shows that when it comes to the benefits of breaking bread as a family, there’s nothing magical about doing it at dinnertime. It’s just as beneficial to sit down together for other meals — breakfast, lunch, even dessert! The key is that you’re together as a family on a regular basis (food helps in this by adding a level of comfort, texture, and enjoyment).
Maybe evenings are crazy for your family, but mornings not so much. Make family breakfast your thing. Let’s say mornings and evenings are bad, but things are pretty chill right before bedtime. Make time for a pre-bed snack as a family. It could be cookies and milk, or if you’re paleo, try some coconut blueberry balls. The important thing is that you get together with your family on a regular basis for some quality conversation and bonding time.
So instead of thinking about making the most of family dinnertime, think of it as getting the most of family meal times.
Teach them the love of cooking. Get your kids involved with making the meal. Kids love to help out with cooking. And letting them do so will help them forge a better appreciation of food and teach them a valuable skill in self-reliance that will really come in handy once they head out on their own. Plus, it gives you a chance to start talking to your kids before you even get to the table.
Take-out (or dining out) is a-okay sometimes. Home cooking is ideal for reasons of both health and cost, but there are always going to be times where you or your wife don’t have time to make a meal from scratch. That’s okay – remember, the important thing is just making the time to sit down together. Getting take-out or going to a restaurant can actually be more relaxing for everyone, and the latter is a lot of fun for the kids.
No TV, cellphones, or tablets. The purpose of family meal times is to strengthen the familial bond. You can’t do that when you’re all silently staring at the TV or while everyone has their eyes glued to their phone. Make it an ironclad rule: no electronic devices at the table.
Play music in the background. This is something we do in our house sometimes. We often play big band or classical tunes, and I try to teach Gus the sounds of the different instruments. If we’re eating Mexican food, I’ll put on some rock en español — Maná and Juanes are two of our favorites. If Kate’s the DJ, it’s often the Guster channel on Pandora. Some quiet background music adds to the atmosphere and just makes the occasion feel a little more special and fun.
Say grace. Saying grace before a meal teaches your kids the importance of gratitude and what a blessing it is to simply have food on their plates. It also teaches delayed gratification – it can be hard for kids to even wait a minute before digging in! If you’re religious, saying grace reaffirms your family’s religious identity as well.
Practice the 10-50-1 Rule. To get the most out of family meal times, you need to get your family talking. And not just about whether the food is too spicy (research has found that most conversation at family meals centers on the quality of the food!). In his book, The Secrets of Happy Families, author Bruce Feiler shares a guideline he uses for family meal times: the 10-50-1 Rule.
Aim for 10 minutes of quality talk. Researchers have found that’s about the average amount of quality talk time an average meal yields, so it’s a good minimum goal. It’s not much, but a little bit each day on a sustained basis really adds up over the long haul.
Let your kid speak 50 percent of the time. Research shows that adults usually hold the floor for 2/3 of that 10-minute conversation time. There are benefits for kids in overhearing adult conversations, but you want to hear what they have to say, too.
Teach your kids 1 new word every meal. Studies indicate that kids who have regular family meal times have larger vocabularies than kids who don’t. But holding regular family dinners won’t magically teach kids new words. Be intentional about it like Bruce is. At every dinner he teaches his kids one new word by playing different games. For example, he’ll throw out a word like “fruit” and then have everyone come up with as many related words as possible. Another game he’ll do is to bring a newspaper to the table and have everyone find a word they don’t know, try to figure out what the word means, and discuss it with the rest of the family.
Conversation. Get good conversation going. If you want to have at least ten minutes of quality talk at each meal, and you want your kids to do half of the talking, you’re going to have to ask them questions. Sometimes kids will give you one-word or non-answers, but just keep trying to elicit a response from different angles. Don’t just ask, “How was your day?” Ask them to tell you one thing they learned that day or what the best part of their day was so far. Ask them if they saw or read anything interesting. As they get older, bring up current events and ask for their opinions on them.
History. Talk about your family history. Psychologist Marshall Duke and his colleague Robyn Fivush found that children who know about their family’s history have a stronger sense of control over their lives, higher self-esteem, and feel more connected to their families than children who don’t know their family’s history. In fact, they discovered that the best single predictor of a child’s emotional health and happiness was their ability to answer questions about their family history, such as:
Do you know where your grandparents grew up?
Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school?
Do you know where your parents met?
Do you know of an illness or something really terrible that happened in your family?
Do you know what went on when you were being born?
Duke and Fivush believe that knowledge of his or her personal family history provides a child with a strong “intergenerational self,” which makes them feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves.
As they hear stories of family struggles and triumphs, kids learn about family narratives that instill resilience.
According to Duke, the most powerful narrative for building resilience in children is the oscillating narrative.
It’s basically the story of continual ups and downs in your family, where, despite what happened, the family always stuck together.
How empowering and inspiring is that for a kid who’s going through a tough time?
Knowing that great-great-great grandpa managed to create a thriving business even after suffering hardship and the death of family members along a wagon trail in the middle of nowhere can help a kid understand that life will be okay even if he doesn’t get into his college of choice.
If grandpa thrived during adversity, he can thrive, too.
No children?
No problem.
Dinners are a time to build your relationship, talk and discuss and make special moments over food and drink. You can make it very special. And that is wonderful.
Enjoy your time together.
Make the dinner a little romantic and memorable Apart from making a great dinner, here are some tips that you must know if you want to make this night memorable.
1. Choose the right drinks
A romantic dinner is not complete without drinks – but your choice of beverages depends on your dishes.
A steak dinner can be paired with an earthy red wine.
You could serve a crisp, chilled white wine if you decided on chicken.
Whatever your decision, make sure you have a bottle opener handy, you don’t want to be caught without one.
If you’re not into alcohol, pick up some fruity, fizzy drinks to go with your date night meals. LIke orange juice, or a nice tea. Or, a well made coffee.
Be sure to have your date’s favorite drinks on hand for after dinner – so stock up on beers, whiskey, or gin. And if it is to be served cola,, make sure that it’s really cold.
Their favorite drink will go well with dessert.
2. Choose easy, simple recipes
When people are trying to find out how to make a romantic dinner, they probably forget that the most romantic dinner recipes are a piece of cake.
You don’t want to worry about too many aspects, complicated sauces, and preparations. Choose a dish that is easy to make with only a few ingredients. Remember this one tip as one of the most important romantic dinner ideas. Else you would be thrown in for a loop!
In a pinch, you can buy a premade instant pizza, and toss a bunch of extra pepperoni and globs of cheese on top of it. Think “adaptation” and “improvement”. You are striving for an event. Not particuliarly a meal.
3. Create the perfect setting
When you are looking up romantic dinner date ideas and trying to figure out how to plan a romantic dinner, you might think of recipes and ingredients.
But here’s the thing – you want to create the entire package. That means food, drinks, and the most important of all – the setting! It could be anything from a home-made special moment, to a plain tablecloth and a candle. Just try to make the dinner a little special.
A special and relaxed atmosphere is the perfect backdrop for a romantic dinner.
4. Relax and enjoy the meal and the company
Don’t forget to sit back, relax, and relish the romantic dinner. If something goes wrong with the food, let it. You don’t want to be stressing over everything so much that you forget to enjoy the experience. It’s all about the conversation and the food.
5. Talk about the good things
Nothing really serious, or anger generating.
You can spend some time reminiscing about the good times, especially if you both have had very little time together recently. So just keep it light and easy. Nothing serious. It’s a time of relaxation and rest.
6. Do not exert yourself too much
As much as you want to make this special, make sure you are not too tired by the end of all of it. Take time to rest and feel good about the night.
7. Dress up
Even if you are both staying home, dress up nicely for each other. You will feel so much better when you put on nice clothes and sit with each other. Guys, maybe you wear a T-shirt all the time, but what’s the harm of thowing on a blazer over it?
I well remember my Zambian (African) girlfriend, who would dress up for every meal. It did not matter if it was at home or outside. Nice outfit. Hair done. Perfume. And ladies, let me tell you what, it’s hard to compete against THAT.
8. Take photos together
Take out some time to take photos of each other, of the food, and together. Pictures are a great way to create memories, and you can always look back on them and relive these moments.
I put mine in a ton load of folders.
Don’t be like MM here. Organize better. My filing system is a shambles. Ugh!
9. Try something new
Make it a point to try something new. It could be a new cuisine, drink, or dish. New experiences with the one you love are a great way to bond. Even the shitty events, and the meals and places that didn’t work out are bonds and stories that we share and remember.
10. Get rid of distractions
Again. No distractions. Put your phone, laptops, and other gadgets away. Put away anything that distracts you and your partner, and spend time only with each other.
I will tell you that even I, almighty MM, slip up and forget this rule from time to time. And my wife, Mrs. MM hits me on the head (as she’s the only pne premitted to do this) and stops me from getting sucked into the information overload vortex.
Do you want more?
I have more posts in my Food Index associated with my Happiness Index here…
Instead of splitting Russia from China, the U.S. has unintentionally done its best to push them into a deeper alliance. It was the most severe strategic error the U.S. could make.-b
I just received a comment from a reader that said that I was “butt hurt” and hated the United States. Well, maybe I am, but I don’t hate the USA.
Instead, I simply tried to explain that I just see the bigger picture and I don’t like what I am seeing.
What I am seeing is all the makings for World War III, and the American citizenry are all actively participating in it.
Like zombies. Just going ahead allowing the rot to get worse, letting the buildings fall down, and reelecting the psychopathic to boss them into submission.
So I am going to create a parable.
It’s the parable of the three houses.
The Three Houses
Once up a time there were three houses in a town. They were all well known throughout the town as they were the biggest and largest homes in the community.
Oh, certainly there were many homes in the town. Nearly 200. But most of the homes were much smaller and inconsequential. Some were opulent, like Frans. Some were poor like little Bang A Desh. Some were complex like the house of Mex, and some were trying to fix things up like Zimmy Bob’s.
The biggest of the three was owned by a big, burly, bearded man who went by the name “Big Russ”. He was a big lumberjack and had this enormous bear for a pet.
The other two homes were roughly the same size, but one had many more children. That home was always lively and active. The kids were always playing and talking, laughing and singing.
That home was owned by a very short, quiet man named “Mr. Lee”. He was a quiet, studious man, who always spoke soft and gently. His hobby was making things, and he was always welcoming others to trade with him. When he wasn’t making things, he was always practicing his martial arts in the peace of his backyard garden.
And the last of the homes was one that sat on top of the biggest hill in the town. It was perhaps the richest of all the homes. Everyone, for years, would look up at the home and want to live there. As it was a truly exceptional home; a mansion really.
That home was owned by a man whom everyone called “Uncle Sam”.
Some History
Now, Uncle Sam, being so tall, strong and incredibly handsome, usually got his way in everything that he did. For years, he has been able to strut around the town without confrontation.
He was so accustomed to getting a “free pass” in everything that he did that he started to brazenly offend the rest of the good townspeople.
He would go inside the other homes, raid their refrigerators, take things that he wanted and sleep with the daughters. No one liked that behavior (with a few exceptions), but no one was able to do anything about it.
And over the years, being so accustomed to being the biggest and baddest person in the town, “Uncle Sam” started to believe that it was the natural order of things. He started to believe that he was able to do this because “God favored him, his lifestyle, and his arrogance”.
He believed that he was the exception to all the rules.
He believed that he could define the rules for all the other houses in the community to obey, and that he would have his own rules; his own “exceptions”.
He started to tell this to everyone.
“I am exceptional” he said.
“I have a big shining house on the hill,” he said.
The other two big houses
Now, Uncle Sam had, from time to time, visited the homes of both Big Russ and Mr. Lee. But, he wasn’t ever welcomed, and over the years they have been getting rather antagonized, and infuriated with his actions and activities.
Realizing that, Uncle Sam pretty much stayed away from those two big homes.
Instead, he preferred to frequent the smaller homes in the less affluent section of the town. This included the homes on Mid-East Avenue, and South-Am Road.
As well as all the homes of the Stan Clan.Uncle Sam has really been active there.
Which included him having to be forcefully removed from both Aff Gan, and Kaz Is’s homes.
But, that doesn’t mean that he didn’t want to go visit Big Russ and Mr. Lee from time to time. But the thing is, that when he visited, his table manners were atrocious. His body odor was foul, and his behaviors were rude and distasteful.
What ever he once was, what he is today is something different. Today, he’s a wife beater, a child molester, an alcoholic drunkard, who has a passion for shoplifting, petty crimes, and rape. When he’s not practicing arson, getting into drunk brawls, or taking “a dump” in other’s yards, he’s out having sex with their dogs.
No one really wants to have much to do with him, because as everyone knows, once you let him in your life you won’t ever be able to get rid of him.
As of late…
The children of Uncle Sam has been busy raising all sorts of ruckus. And what’s more, they have been all over the town doing so.
Mr. Lee complained about it.
He told Uncle Sam to take his children, and get out of his backyard. He told him to get off his front porch. He told him to stop peeking into his windows. He told him to stop sabotaging his car, pouring salt in his garden, and pulling up his tulips. He told him to get his dogs and chain them up. He no longer wanted to hear them barking day and night, digging up his bushes, and having his children race around and around the home in loud muffler-less motorcycles.
Big Russ complained about it as well.
He told Uncle Sam to get off his porch, stay out of his backyard. He told him that he no longer wanted those children to set fires to the neighboring yards, stealing the lawn ornaments, and playing their rock-and-roll music at all hours of the day and night.
Uncle Sam heard both of their complaints.
He thought about them.
And said “no”.
The reactions…
Well, Big Russ told Uncle Sam that there would be repercussions. But, took no overt and obvious action.
He sent his children out (in secret) to the yard of Uncle Sam. Then, he sat back and smiled. No firecrackers. No noise-makers. No barking dogs. No loud motorcycles. No. Those children all silently, and sternly, went off to the house armed with dangerously lethal ten-gage shotguns.
No “fun and games”.
And Mr. Lee, always kind and quiet, smiled and sat on his porch with an 8-gage shotgun (which, is a very large gun, don’t you know).
His children, and were told to stay in the house and practice their martial arts, cleaning their long-guns, and reading up on the book “the art of war”.
But Uncle Sam, seemingly an idiot, doubled down.
“Do as I say” he roared!
“You WILL obey me! You will listen to me, and you will pay homage and tribute to me!”
And he sent his children, and his toadies over to the house of Mr. Lee. And, now, almost all of his children are going around and around the house of Mr. Lee. They are revving their engines and making as much noise as they can possibly create. Poor Mr. Lee is really getting “rattled up” with his windows shaking, and the dishes falling on the floor. His tulips all decimated, and his gates town and broken.
And, well Uncle Sam has also started to send his other remaining children to camp out on the porch of Big Russ. There they are lighting campfires on the “welcome mat” and tossing firecrackers at all hours of the day and night. Giggling, sticking out their tongues and making rude sounds and laughing.
It was noisy for years.
Really years.
And then Mr. Lee and Big Russ held a party.
It was a big party and it was held in the dead of Winter. Everyone was invited except Uncle Sam and his “toadies”.
And at the meeting, they announced that the entire town cannot grow and live in peace as long as there is a big bully in town, and that all of the townspeople must gather together and start committing to their promises, agreements, and rules. And that they would take the lead.
Everyone in the party agreed. The welcomed the inclusiveness of it, and their equal participation in it. And of course, they too hated the rude behaviors and the bullying behaviors of Uncle Sam.
The entire town rejoiced in a defined, sensible plan for dealing with the town bully and his toadies.
Now, let me ask the reader a question…
Looking at the big picture…
What action should Uncle Sam take to defuse a tense, potentially catastrophic event train?
I would suggest, sending his kids back home. Paddling them until their butts are red and sore, and selling off all those motorcycles, barking dogs, and firecrackers.
Then apologizing in public to the community.
If you were Big Russ, what action do you think you should take?
Would it be against the children on the porch; a continuous game of "whack a mole", or would it be against Uncle Sam himself?
If you were Mr. Lee, what action do you think you should take?
Would you wait until more children arrive and get louder and badder? Or would you lay down systems to disable those motorcycles? Or would you burn down the gas stations, so the motorcycles couldn't get any more gas?
Do you think that making an announcement at that party was a goo thing to do?
Words without action are meaningless. This is a solid framework that requires tasking. Is the rest of the town up to handle the challenge?
And that is how things are.
And MM here is just trying NOT to pick sides so much as I just want the entire town to live together in peace and harmony.
I live in the house with Mr. Lee. It’s a pleasant, peaceful, kind and calm place. I want to keep it that way. Don’t you?
Please, please make the best of what you have RIGHT NOW. Maybe there are evil psychopathic people, idiots and nasty malcontents. But you are in control of your bubble of reality. You can affect your own life.
You can make the world a better place. Please do so.
Do you really spend enough time with those that you love? Do you have a family that spends happy and sad times together? Is your life rich with pets, friends and savory food?
Spend time with family, friends, or just have fun…
Likten to me.
I know it’s so easy to get caught up with work, needs, goals, objectives and all the rest. I, too, spend a lot of my time scrubbing dog shit off the floor, changing baby diapers, and fielding calls at midnight to Salesmen in Canada and the United States, but you all must start spending more “quality time” (such an overused expression)… more “fun time”.
Play a video game in full immersive simulation. video 6.3MB
You do know that the technology is really advanced in China these days. Like this. Video 2MB
We must be more than ourselves…
Yeah. Having fun is what relaxes us and adds the taste and spice to our lives. It’s really important, and terribly underutilized. Instead, it has been replaced by media, and social networking. I think that we should always look at the bigger picture.
Like what?
Food.
Tasty long cooking food (not the fast food). Delicious. Food. Like your grandmother used to make. Food. Like baked fish, city chicken, scalloped potatoes, corned beef and cabbage and Beef Stroganoff. Food. Stuff that are difficult to get in restaurants. Stuff that your wife and family members can experiment with and make signature dishes that feed and nurture.
And then relax.
Chat over the food. Talk about your day. About her day. About your friends. About what needs to be done. About hope. Dreams. Plans.
Conversation.
Not television.
Don’t wait for others to make it happen. It’s YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. Act in control of YOUR life. Stop waiting for others to do things… to agree on things… to endless debate things. Just do it.
You be the guiding light.
You.
YOU.
Start carving out a place in the table of life, and YOU start inviting others to share in your little piece of Heaven.
GOod friends. Good family. Good food and drink.
You start it. You make it happen.
Beef Stroganoff.
It will happen.
So will a nice, safe, secure home. Cozy, warm. Dry. Tastefully decorated. Your wife is in charge of everything domestic.
She’s the boss.
Like on an aircraft carrier. There is a Captain, and then there is the XO. She’s the Executive Officer, and you are the Captain. Be the Captain; steer that ship to a fine safe harbor and prosper there.
I’m giving you all the keys, don’t you know.
You will get, also, because of your lower stress and improved organization, a group of friends where you BELONG. You will get participation in life. Pets. A cat or two. Maybe a dog.
You will be invited places. You will have good walks. Good times. Great conversation, and people who make special occasions becuse…
…well…
…because (insert lame excuse here).
You will get other things as well.
A hobby. A pleasure or two.
And care about our surroundings.
Watch out for the kids, and the pets that run in front of us from time to time.
Visit historical places. Enjoy the day on the beach or a snowy mountain hike. Play with your pets, or friends. Just start getting engaged in discussions about all sorts of interesting and curious things.
Sit on the porch with an inviting porch light on. Invite neighbors over for a game of checkers, or cards. Have beer available, or iced tea.
Please know that you can make your life in a real paradise on the earth.
You really can. You just have to manufacture it.
You run your prayer affirmation campaigns and implement them in accordance to your fate forecasts. You follow the guidelines on being a Rufus, and participating in the community.
You get your home life in order. You divide responsibilities. Stop trying to run the whole world and carry it on your shoulders. Stop that egotistical nonsense.
Share the responsibilities.
The wife is in charge of all finances and all domestic, you (if you are a man) are in charge of earning money and fixing things. You earn it. She spends it. It’s the natural order of things.
You give her all the money you make, and she hands back a living allowance. Things are much calmer and better that way.
No worries.
I tell you (men) that once you do this, you will forever never have to worry about food, bills, or disputes EVER again. She will take care of everything. You won’t have those worries. Never again.
You will eat WELL. Really, really well. You will have a larder, and a freezer full of premade meals, and canned goods.
Your stress level will go WAY down. There is nothing like daily meals of good fine delicious food, good conversation and an evening of winding down in cool soft relaxation.
And you will be able to focus on your job.
And your life will really start to look like this…
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Here’s a nice look at some of the meals that my mother used to make for us kids when we were young. As we grew up and moved away from home, these delicious home cooked meals were replaced by fast food, and restaurant set meals.
Sigh.
What began as an occasional trip once or twice to “Big Boy”, became a weekly event in the late 1970’s, and almost daily after the early 1980’s. That coiencided with the absolutely frenzied rise of McDonald’s and Burger King franchises.
In those days, McDonalds’ used to have the words “Over XXXX customers sold”.
Thousands became Millions.
Millions became Billions.
Billions became, “Billions and Billions”.
And everyone was living this sort of frenzied, fast-paced lifestle.
In truth, for decades I lived off of a mixture of fast food, easy to prepare cheap foods at home (spaghetti, hamburger, chicken) and restaurant staples.
I argue that many people still live this kind of pitiful life; not getting to live a life filled with delicious and tasty, healthy food.
This article looks at what my family used to cook for me that no longer exists in the diets of most Americans today. It’s not what I used to make to eat, or what my first and second wives made for me to eat. It’s what my parents, and my grandparents made for me to eat.
We start off with something that doesn’t seem to be that popular any more. Perhaps it’s becuase no one knows how to make it right. I am referring to meatloaf.
Meatloaf?
Yeah. Sure. Meatloaf.
You do NOT use the cheapest cuts of meat, and throw everything into it. You do not live in a school cafeteria. No. You should use quality ingredients, and keep things simple.
Classic Meatloaf
Delicious meatloaf.
Even if you have nightmares of cafeteria meatloaf, giving this classic another shot can make you realize why this staple was such a hit. This throwback recipe brings everything home and reminds you of all the rich flavors of beef, tomatoes, and that iconic meatloaf texture.
Just like it is easy to use the cheapest ground meat, the cheapest left over bread, and the near-expiration-date ingredients, don’t. Take the time and use good, healthy ingredients, and present it in a fine loving way that it deserves. Your family will love you for it.
Cooked tomatoes, peppers, and onions instead of store bought ketchup.
Ground beef instead of ground chuck.
Go easy on the bread crumbs.
I like to eat it with sliced bread and (real salted) butter, mashed potatoes, and corn, peas, or some other well steamed vegitable.
Southern-Style Cornmeal Catfish with Tomato Gravy
Southern-Style Cornmeal Catfish with Tomato Gravy.
Fried fish has always come across tables as a dinner standard, but it gets harder and harder to find fried catfish on the menu at most dinners.
This recipe will make you remember why this economical fish was such a favorite, and it will evoke memories of fish fries and summer days. With a crispy cornmeal crust and an easy frying technique, this recipe is achievable for any home cook.
The best and most important thing to remember is to debone it, and serve deep fried, breaded filets.
Tasty catfish.
It goes really good with pickled tomatoes, Southern “hushpuppies”, french fried potatoes and really icy cold beer. Don’t you know?
Chicken and Dumplings
Chicken and Dumplings.
Whether you grew up in the North or the South, you’ve likely tried some variant of this classic dish that has stretched far and wide across America. The tender, chewy dumplings provide a perfect textural pairing with the moist chicken. It all gets coated in a down-home gravy that whips up nostalgia in an instant. For a trip down memory lane, bring this classic to a table near you.
And don’t forget the wide sturdy spoon to gather the great amount of broth. I always liked to eat it with salt and some sprinkled cheddar cheese. But that’s jsut me.
Classic Green Bean Casserole
Classic Green Bean Casserole.
Everyone remembers their first green bean casserole, likely made with cream of mushroom soup and fried onion straws. Even if you eventually burnt out on this dish as a kid, now is the perfect time to explore the casserole again.
By mixing up the ingredients, you can avoid any traumatic memories of canned green beans and use only the freshest produce to make this dish pop.
Try using green beans, AND asparagus, with some real sauteed mushrooms.
That’s the real secret. Get fresh ingredients and let it cook for a good long time so that all the savory flavors mix and become outrageously delicious.
.
Brown Butter Honey-Glazed Carrots
Brown Butter Honey-Glazed Carrots.
Sometimes, simplicity brings out the best flavors from quality ingredients. This old-fashioned recipe takes that mentality to heart by pairing fresh carrots with a sweet and rich honey butter glaze. You’ll not only evoke generations past, but you’ll also whip up a new family favorite everyone can love that costs little time and money to prepare. To round out your dinner, this should prove an instant favorite.
Healthy food, cooked properly, is the key to great family happiness.
.
This is not a stand-alone meal, but rather a dish that acts as a side ot other food entres.
Honey-Glazed Ham and Cheddar Muffins
Honey-Glazed Ham and Cheddar Muffins.
When you imagine an old-fashioned Sunday meal, each table spread probably includes a baked ham and bread offered up for everyone. This take on a classic refines what everyone loved about a night at home on the weekend by featuring a delectable honey-glazed ham. Paired with the fluffy cheddar muffins, each bite of ham will be a taste of heaven.
The secret is that the cheddar cheese, and honey-glazed ham mix together scrumpiously.
Hamburg Steaks
Hamburg Steak.
You probably haven’t thought about Hamburg steaks in quite some time, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t take a crack at this once-popular staple. They’re easier to make than traditional steaks on the grill. And each portion packs in so much flavor, you’ll wonder why you never tried this recipe sooner.
I find that the secret is to let the steaks cook a nice long time at lower heat in a deep savory broth. You can add garlic, onions, and mushrooms to really kick out that flavor.
Hamburg Steaks cooking in a long savory broth / sauce.
Sunday Chili
Sunday Chili.
It’s harder to find Sunday Chili on home menus nowadays. This classic not only provides a cumin kick to liven up any night, and one big pot could last for days. With easy-to-find ingredients and little prep work, this dish deserves a revival.
Keep in mind that it goes really well with rice, and lots of cheese. When I was younger, I would crunch up crackers and eat with it, but I discovered that if you pair this with garlic bread you will have an absolutely satisfying meal.
.
Oh, and by the way, this meal goes great with an icy cold beer or two.
Root Beer-Glazed Ham
Root Beer-Glazed Ham.
In the ’50s and ’60s, home cooks paired novel items in ways you might never have expected. While many of these recipes deserve to have died out, some deserve a second chance.
For instance, root beer-glazed ham stood out from the crowd by providing that sugary bite usually drawn from a honey glaze.
And the acidity of the soda helps tenderize the meat, making for one delectable ham. If you’ve only heard rumors of this dish, now is the best time to give this recipe a shot!
I can tell you that this goes great with a table “spread”.
You lay out sliced lettice (all fresh and washed completely), sliced tomatoes (I add salt and olive oil to the slices), some thin sliced onions (the restrurants all trend is to have these super thick onion slices, I like mine paper thin), and fresh hot baked bread. Add some pickles, cheeses (a selection in sandwich slices), and some marinated olives, marinated peppers.
Ah, some marinated olives.
Oh and don’t forget a fine selection of condiments…
Horseradish
Wasabi
Sweet salad dressing.
Mayonaise.
Ketchup.
Sweet butter chips (sliced pickles)
Dill pickles (spear shape)
Olive oil.
Butter.
vinegar.
Salt and pepper.
Hot mix
Hot mix.
Keep the bread warm, and the ham hot.
The tomatoes should always sit in warm water for a few minutes to push out the flavor and punch them into a state of mouth watering organism. then slice them and add salt and olive oil, and then place on their own plate.
Then you make yourself a fine sandwich and eat it with wine, and some great conversation.
Some thoughts
If you get on the internet and search for food, you will come up with all kinds of articles on the recipes on how to make the food. You might even come across some diet guru that is trying to get you to invest in “their plan”. (A subject in itself.) But you will hardly ever find articles on the joys of eating the food everyone prepares.
I don’t like that.
Food is a very important part of our lives.
It is more than just nutrition, it is a social venue. One, that is terribly neglected in modern Wester society.
And here, here, I argue that it shouldn’t be that way. I argue that food should be a major part of your life, and well planned healthy meals should be the stable from which everything else is derived.
And that’s where the family comes in.
[1] Savings
You will find and discover that a singular weekly meal might cost just slightly less than a restaurant meal, but the time it took to make it was problematic. Ingredient costs alone might equal that of a mid-range restrurant meal. And yet, it might take you an hour or more to make.
Don’t freak out.
Buy in bulk, and plan the meals a week in advance. Like adults do; like people who are in control of their lives do.
Of course, all families are different, which is why I strongly advocate a very traditional division of labor for the family and disparage the idea of a home with two people working for others. One person stays home and take on all the domestic issues and controls the money. The other earns the money, and handles maintence and repairs.
Now, if you plan on five such meals a week, and budget accordingly, you will discover a substantial savings in money, and an improvement in your family communication. And these particular changes will really positively affect your life.
This will be true EVEN if you subtract the secondary source of income. (And all the other expenses that come with it.)
[2] Social
We are social creatures. Every opportunity for us to share times with others in a neutral to positive way should be embraced and nurtured.
No one ever told you this.
Well, maybe it’s becuase they don’t appreciate things as they used to be.
Eating food historically is a social and cultural construct that helps us connect with each others. In England, this resulted in pubs. In China this resulted in those big private meal rooms.
Unfortunately, one of the very first social reengineering efforts in the United States was to destroy this social activity and replace it with a for-profit, fast and isolated eating format. Two hour lunch hours were reduced to thirty minutes, and in some cases only fifteen minutes (at work). Car drive-throughs in fast food chains popped up everywhere, and even table sizes shrank. All facilitating a most lonely singular existence of socially disconnected loners.
Eating alone in the car.
Listening to talk radio.
Not to each other. Not savoring the flavors.
Instead, isolated, and shoving cheap, mass-produced animal feed to keep them toiling in companies, and manipulated in every singular manner possible.
So think in terms of fine sit-down ritualized meals.
No, this meal-time is not an event for horse-play and arguments. It’s a time of kindness and shared emotions. Be positive. Be kind. Be uplifting. Say good and nice things. Make the other people want to share more meals with you.
Your life will improve.
[3] Health
Healthy foods prepared with care and affection, and served in a fine healthy environment will certainly help improve your over all health, general well-being and happiness.
It will.
You will live longer, and have a much better overall quality of life too boot.
How to use this article
It is my hope that you will go through the various food items I have shown herein and pick one. Then search the internet for a recipe for it, and then gather the materials and make it.
But it’s more than that.
Record your costs in a notebook. Record how long it took you to make it, and then have a formal sit down meal with your family or friends and record (in the notebook) how it went.
Then compare that to the “normal” everyday meals that you have been eating over the last month or so.
Conclusions
You will find that the mixture of cooking, delicious food, fellowship over a meal and the cost savings are far superior to what you (most probably) have been living off of for the last few months.
You will.
A social life will emerge.
A closer and better relationship with your family will occur.
You will make new friends, and will be healthier and happier.
And if so, I encourage you to keep it up. Start small and simple. Mix it up some. And have a great time with it. Enjoy life. (If everything goes well…) This one will be your last.
Oh, and don’t forget an after-dinner dessert and coffee (or whatever beverage that appeals to you). It’s stuff that magic memories are made out of.
An after dinner dessert and coffee.
Do you want more?
I have more posts in my Food Index associated with my Happiness Index here…
There’s been a bunch of big earth-shattering changes going on Geo-Politically and domestically. And Though I try to be topical, it’s really freaking out a lot of my MM readership. So I’m going put the brakes on that stuff. Sort of, and get back to some easier stuff to sooth our souls.
And this post is dedicated to Michelle. The stress of moving to a new area, and caring for family has been taking it’s toll. It’s time for a cool look and reminder of whence we came from.
You probably picture everyone dressed in bell-bottoms, their shirts unbuttoned down to their navels and their perfectly coiffed shag haircuts not budging as they boogie-woogied all night long.
And while that may be a fairly accurate snapshot—especially the bell-bottoms—it’s by no means the complete picture.
For those who came of age during the grooviest decade in history, memories run deeper than Donna Summer (Ohhhh I love to love ya baby.) and questionable fashion choices. LOL.
But seriously folks…
The best parts of your childhood probably involved things today’s kids will never know
From an article that I picked up and chopped up out of my unedited stash slush box...
The endless stretch of a lazy summer afternoon. Visits to a grandparent’s house in the country. Riding your bicycle through the neighborhood after dark. These were just a few of the revealing answers from more than 400 Twitter users in response to a question: “What was a part of your childhood that you now recognize was a privilege to have or experience?”
That question, courtesy of writer Morgan Jerkins, revealed a poignant truth about the changing nature of childhood in the US: The childhood experiences most valued by people who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s are things that the current generation of kids are far less likely to know.
That’s not a reference to cassette tapes, bell bottoms, Blockbuster movies, and other items popular on BuzzFeed listicles. Rather, people are primarily nostalgic for a youthful sense of independence, connectedness, and creativity that seems less common in the 21st century.
The Partridge Family.
The childhood privileges that respondents seemed to appreciate most in retrospect fall into four broad categories:
[1] The ability to take risks
“Riding my bike at all hours of the day into the evening throughout many neighborhoods without being stopped or asked what I was doing there,” was one Twitter user’s answer to Jerkins’ question.
Another commenter was grateful for “summer days & nights spent riding bikes anywhere & everywhere with friends, only needing to come home when the streetlights came on,” while yet another recalled “having a peaceful, free-range childhood.”
Countless others cited the freedom to explore—with few restrictions—as a major privilege of their childhood.
American children have less independence and autonomy today than they did a few generations ago.
For many of today’s children, that privilege is disappearing.
American children have less independence and autonomy today than they did a few generations ago. As parents have become increasingly concerned with safety, fewer children are permitted to go exploring beyond the confines of their own backyard.
Some parents have even been prosecuted or charged with neglect for letting their children walk or play unsupervised.
Meanwhile, child psychologists say that too many children are being ushered from one structured activity to the next, always under adult supervision—leaving them with little time to play, experiment, and make mistakes.
That’s a big problem.
Kids who have autonomy and independence are less likely to be anxious, and more likely to grow into capable, self-sufficient adults.
In a recent video for The Atlantic, Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of How to Raise an Adult, argues that so-called helicopter parents “deprive kids the chance to show up in their own lives, take responsibility for things and be accountable for outcomes.”
That message seems to be gaining traction. The state of Utah, for example, passed a “free-range” parenting law in 2018 meant to give parents the freedom to send kids out to play on their own.
[2] Lots of time with family
Another privilege cited by many Twitter respondents was regular time with their parents—around the dinner table, on weekends, on vacation—and access to meaningful interactions with other family members, especially grandparents.
One respondent wrote “My paternal grandparents were my daycare and their house in the country was my playground.”
Another said, “my Italian grandparents lived on a street with a slew of their brothers and sisters. Nobody had any money. Everyone’s doors were open all day. Coffee always on, something on the stove. Endless stories and laughter. The happiest world.”
In an email to Quartz, Jerkins said that many of the respondents “were talking about having their grandparents around, which I thought was incredibly heartwarming.”
Spending time with grandparents is also an important part of child development: Close grandparent-child relationships have significant mental health benefits both for kids and for grandparents, and encourage prosocial behavior in children.
That’s especially true of dads, 63% of whom say that they spend too little time with their kids.
Fondue.
[3] Reading books
Reading is good for children. It makes them more literate, better at math, and more academically successful in general.
So it’s no wonder that a large majority of the respondents to Jerkins’ Twitter question answered cited time for reading as a major privilege of their childhood.
“Books. Hundreds and thousands of them moving through our house—from libraries, bookstores, passed from friends and coworkers of my parents.
No idea too frightening or taboo to discuss or analyze,” one Twitter user wrote. “Books saved my life,” another said.
Today’s teens, however, are reading significantly less than their predecessors. In 1984, 8% of 13-year-olds and 9% of 17-year-olds said they “never” or “hardly ever” read for pleasure.
In 2014, that number had almost tripled, to 22% and 27%. And entire cities have now become “book deserts,” wherein the chances that kids in low-income urban neighborhoods finding children’s books for loan or purchase are slim to none.
[4] A screen-free existence
Gratitude for a childhood free of Facebook and smartphones was another common thread.
Another user answered: “A childhood without social media, tablets, mobile devices, apps, etc.” “I am so happy and blessed,” she continued, “that I can reflect on a childhood filled with books, board games, Razor scooters, and VHS tapes.”
Freedom from the constraints of an online presence is something that not a lot of US kids get to experience these days.
The latest research from Pew shows that 95% of teens report owning a smartphone or having access to one, and that 45% of teens say they are online on a “near-constant” basis.
That’s a marked change from even three years ago, the last time Pew conducted a survey of teens’ technology use, and found that 24% of teens went online “almost constantly.”
With the technology habits of today’s kids comes an increased risk of isolation, depressoin, and other mental health issues, along with the rise of cyber-bullying. A recent study in the journal Emotion showed that “the more hours a day teens spend in front of screens, the less satisfied they are.”
Reinventing childhood…
It’s only after we grow up that we’re able to recognize all the factors that made us into the people we are today.
Jerkins tells Quartz that she’s grateful for many privileges she was afforded: “Private tutoring. Flute lessons. Tap lessons. Dance and gymnastics lessons. Overnight summer camps. Regular summer camps. Books. Travel. Frequent trips to Disney World.” “I was very lucky,” she wrote.
A safe, healthy childhood is a privilege that far too few children in the US and around the world ever get to experience.
But even children who are lucky enough to grow up in a stable environment may not have the kind of adventurous, family-oriented, independent childhoods that the Twitter users who responded to Jerkins’ question describe.
Kids seem to be all the more unhappy for it. Maybe it’s time for a change.
A time for change…
And with the current state of the world as bizarre and challenging as it is right now, who could blame you for having some serious reappraisals on your life and the lifestyles of your family.
Is it time yet?
When I moved to China, I was stunned how community oriented it was, how the children were all out playing, or working with their parents, or spending time with their grandparents. These were things that I grew up with back when I was young, but that is wholly absent today.
Now, I’m not saying that suddenly everyone needs to get a pet rock, or put on some earth shoes, but maybe we all need to be a little less serious and a little more accommodating.
Let’s look at what it was like when I was growing up…
Taking care of Pet Rocks
A pet rock.
Pretty fucked up. I know. But it wasn’t as really serious as we all make it. It was a sort of shrug, and “let’s fuck with someone” kind of play.
.
So…
In the ’70s, we begged our parents for $4 so that we could buy… a rock. Sure, this makes it sound like ’70s kids were the victims of the biggest con in history—and we were.
But we have no regrets.
I almost bought one as a Christmas gift for my “secret Santa” at work. But I was fortunately persuaded to buy something else. So I bought a gallon (about four liters) of a very, very, very cheap perfume. He he. Well, I was, after all, only 16 years old.
We got to feed our Pet Rocks, take them for walks, and even clean up after them, just like a real pet. Call us fools if you must, but we loved our Pet Rocks.
The 1970’s was a a place; a “state of mind”. It really was “dazed and confused.
Like going to a movie theater and being traumatized for months afterwards…
Being afraid to go in the ocean after Jaws
Yikes!
Jaws. A mighty big fish.
All it took was one seriously terrifying movie—Steven Spielberg’s 1975 shark fright fest Jaws—to keep an entire generation of children out of the ocean. All of us ’70s kids would scan the water for signs of a shark fin, hearing da-dum, da-dum, da-dum in our heads as we did.
And let’s not forget Linda Blair in the movie “The Exorcist”.
The Exorcist
Yeah. I was on a date with a girl when I watched it, I had to carry her in my arms to the car afterwards. BTW, my old GTO, don’t you know.
My GTO. Sigh.
I do miss my GTO.
Schoolhouse Rock
I myself didn’t like it, but my younger brother and sister did. I guess that is how they ended up learning math and grammar. You know, from Schoolhouse Rock.
Schoolhouse Rock
These educational animated shorts popped up amid our usual Saturday morning cartoon line-up. And their songs were so darn catchy that we didn’t even mind that they were tricking us into learning.
With educational hits like “Conjunction Junction” and “Three Is a Magic Number,”Schoolhouse Rock probably taught us more than our actual teachers did. Ask anybody who grew up in the ’70s to explain how laws are made in our country and they’ll likely start singing “I’m Just a Bill.”
Oh yeah.
We all wore them…
Tube Socks
Everyone wore tube socks.
.
Everyone.
Tube Socks.
No self-respecting ’70s kid would ever walk out for gym class without a pair of tube socks, preferably one long enough to reach their knees. We all suffered from the same delusion that tube socks made us look athletic and not incredibly silly.
At least we weren’t alone, though. Everyone from Farrah Fawcett to Kareem-Abdul Jabbar made a very convincing case that tube socks were cool.
Yuppur.
Real cool beans.
Worshipping Fonzie
Everyone was into the Fonz.
The Fonz looks at Richie.
Kids didn’t tune in to the sitcom Happy Days because they were nostalgic about the ’50s. They did it to see the Fonz, the coolest character on TV. All across the country, kids would be practicing their Fonzie thumbs up and saying “Ayyyy” with the perfect Henry Winkler inflection.
Then, they would go off and ride their bikes.
Having Tupperware pride
Tupperware
Of course, people still use Tupperware today, but it’s nothing like it was in the ’70s. Our Tupperware was colorful and bold, something that you actually wanted to show off when you opened your lunch at school.
The generation before us even had Tupperware parties to sell these much sought-after storage containers. In the 1970s, you’d have an easier time walking into somebody’s house and stealing a lamp than leaving with their Tupperware. Seriously, we loved it that much.
Using the 8-track player in your car
An 8-track player.
Nobody actually liked 8-track tapes—they were simply the only thing available in the ’70s for recording and listening to music before the cassette came to town. They were incredibly complicated, with four “programs” instead of sides. You had to toggle from program to program, making the whole enterprise hugely annoying and clunky.
In my “neck of the woods”, we had an 8-track player when I was 16 years old and dating my 14 year old girl friend. An FM adapter came when I was 18 years old, and then when I was 19 came the cassette.
Witnessing TV go off the air at night
Then dead air and static. No problem, though. We would just put a few albums on the turntable.
Television station went off the air.
Television wasn’t available 24/7 during our childhood. At around 1 or 2 a.m., most TV stations signed off for the night, playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before leaving us with a test card of color bars. Anyone suffering from insomnia didn’t have a lot of options in those days.
Seeing Star Wars in theaters for the first time
I watched it with another girl. It was her idea, and after a successful date watching “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, we went to Butler, PA and watched this gem. She drove. Not me. She had a silver Chevy Chevelle.
Those were the days.
Hot cars. Fun girls.
A large pizza for a $1.
I guess it was in a galaxy a long, time ago. Sigh.
Star Wars
When George Lucas’s space opera first hit movie theaters in 1977, it was unlike anything the world had ever seen. If you ask anyone who saw the original Star Wars in theaters about their experience, they’ll be able to tell you every little detail, right down to how long they waited in line. For a ’70s kid, it’s easy to get goosebumps just thinking about it.
Yeah. I do remember getting on the phone and talking for hours about the movie.
Chatting on the phone for hours.
Practicing the Hustle
Everyone did it. Though many of us deeply regretted it in the morning.
Dancing the Hustle.
Before there was the Macarena, there was the Hustle. When Van McCoy implored us in his 1975 hit to “do the Hustle,” we all knew we had to learn this dance or we’d be left behind.
Sinking our feet into shag carpeting
God. You all have no idea.
Shag Carpeting.
Shag carpets looked hideous, almost like the hair on the head of a gigantic Muppet. And yet, they were also surprisingly cozy on bare feet. The material felt so soft to the touch that it made an entire generation overlook its heinous appearance.
When Marcia Brady moved out of the house, it was probably to an apartment like this…
Groovy.
With enough black laquer, your den would be fit for a villain from Kung Fu.
They just don’t make houses this way any more.
The perfect kitchen for spilling tomato sauce.
Perfect.
Laughing at Saturday Night Live
Went great with beer.
The crew of Saturday Night Live.
If you weren’t old enough to stay up late and watch Saturday Night Live when it first launched in 1975, you probably had an older sibling or a parent who was—and did. The morning after, you’d beg them to recount every hilarious moment, even if you didn’t always understand all the jokes. If nothing else, the merciless torture of a clay figure named Mr. Bill felt like the most brilliant bit in the world.
Doing the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” dance
Yeah. People danced back then.
The Village People.
The Hustle was hardly the only iconic dance to come out of the ’70s. You can immediately tell if somebody came of age during the decade by whether or not they reflexively spell out the letters “Y,” “M,” “C,” and “A” with their arms whenever this Village People song is played.
Growing up with Sesame Street
Sesame Street.
Every child born in the last 50 years has likely been influenced by Sesame Street in some way. But for ’70s kids who got to experience the PBS show from the beginning, the program was a revelation. We were the first generation to fall in love with Big Bird, Grover, Bert, and Ernie, the fictional characters who taught us everything we needed to know growing up.
For me, I was busy watching Mary Harman, Mary Hartman.
Mary Harman, Mary Hartman.
Expressing ourselves with mood rings
It was very cool.
Mood Ring.
This ’70s fashion accessory was also a liquid crystal thermometer, which is how it could “recognize” your emotional state. Blue meant you were calm or relaxed, amber meant you were nervous or anxious, and black meant you were angry. For ’70s kids, showing someone the color of their mood ring was much easier than talking about feelings.
And who can forget…
Smashing clackers together
Clackers.
What’s surprising isn’t that ’70s kids loved this toy, which consisted of two heavy acrylic balls attached to string intended to be banged together at full force—it’s that it took years before somebody noticed that clackers produced a lot of shrapnel. In 1976, the United States government finally deemed the toy a “mechanical hazard,” and they were taken off store shelves.
Well.
Well.
It was a different time and a different place. And it’s fine to remember the good, the bad and the truly messed up. But you know, the things that we miss today are the things that we took for granted back then.
If something is going well for you; put it in your affirmations so that it keeps supplying you with good and happy memories. Don’t take it for granted. Things taken for granted often disappear.
To underline and appreciate what you appreciate in your affirmations. It’s not just about your future. It’s also about keeping intact things that matter to you.
You know if more people do this, we would still have $1 pizza pies everywhere, we’d be zooming around in GTO’s, and listening to “real” music.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Here’s some videos of Russia. Please kindly pay attention.
Throughout America, we have been filled with these lies and false narratives about how terrible dark and horrible Russia is. Many of us still believe it because in this age of Tiktoc and you-tube, very few Russian and Chinese videos are permitted inside the United States. We all know how President Trump clamped down on the dissemination of videos out of China, and Russia follows the same model. Keep Americans ignorant; feed them lies and other things to cause them to be fearful, and then tax them.
Those in Washington DC make the world a dark and fearful place. Tell Americans that they are the best, and to be afraid of the rest of the world. It’s one big nasty lie.
Here’s some videos out of Russia. Most are centered in Western Russia which is rather nice. Don’t you know. there are twenty short micro videos. Most under two minutes, and if you click on the link they will open up on a new tab.
Today, Russia and China are very, very close. Putin referred to the relationship as symbiotic.
Symbiotic.
Characterized by or being a close, cooperative, or interdependent relationship
The relationship is strong, tight, and mutually beneficial to each party. They work together on all levels, and with the new global realignments, it would be wise to pay attention to Russia. Yes. Not just China, but Russia as well.
For the last 100 years, the United States has been the force behind the vast bulk of wars, famine, diseases, turmoil, terror, suppression and everything else bad that you find in the world today. From mindless corporate drones, to drug-induced street walking zombies, to massive prison complexes, the the Coronavirus pandemic, the United States has been behind it all…
For the world to move forward and embrace a new and better reality, this evil will need to be vanquished. Just like in the Tolken stories about the dragon Smaug, you need to destroy the monster before the people can live life freely.
I cannot see into the future, but it appears quite clear to me that the destruction of this evil is necessary to make the world a better and safer place. How it will happen is unknown, but it will have to happen. Sooner or later.
America is like this mentally ill alcoholic that is repeatedly raping the children in the neighborhood, setting fires to all the houses, and shitting on the sidewalks in front of your house. Sooner or later, he must go. There simply isn’t any other alternative.
Do you want more?
I have more articles like this one in my Happiness Index, here…
When I was doing time, during my retirement, I met another spook. I was in a holding facility inside of Pennsylvania while my transfer papers were being “processed”. All in all it took around six months to process me and sent me to Arkansas. It’s a long story that I really don’t want to get into right now.
Anyways, I met him while I was in this facility. He was on my block and we were able to talk during chow, and during the one hour that we were allowed outside to exercise.
He was going through the same kind of “retirement” as I was. He too was being retired as a “sex offender”. Anyways, he was not part of MAJestic. But rather was attached to an agency in lose association with the United States Army.
Anyways, to make a long story short, he had a role in the transport of people and illegal materials back and forth between the United States and Russia. Oh yeah. What is illegal, and what is the purview of the United States government is a grey area that is often open to interpretation.
Now all that being said, I have met many, many fine folk from Russia and the former Soviet Union block states of Eastern Europe inside of Russia. Russia and China have decades of mutual collaboration and similar interests. The idea that somehow they hate each other is a narrative constructed by the “five-eyes-network” and their Washington Neocon masters. Typically Russians and Chinese get along together fine. They are both in Asia after all.
You know, it’s silly when you think about it.
It’s like saying that the United States and Canada are going to have a war, any day now, because of the long standing dispute over maple syrup and beaver pelt harvesting.
Anyways, he would tell me about the life that he had inside of Russia; living as it was, unofficially and without documentation He picked up the language and became a rather adept pugilist.
So with that as a lead in, and realizing that (aside from one or two visits that I cannot speak about) I would like to display some videos from “Mother Russia” to give you all a taste and feel for the nation, the country and the people there.
Russia is the land of ice and snow.
And people think nothing of interacting in it. As we see here. What I like about this particular video is the calmness of the scene. I can well imagine myself in a small skiff paddling down a snowy stream in the dead of Winter as well.
I don’t really get it, but apparently the clash of ultra cold water, and then followed up with a warm sauna is supposedly very relaxing. Or is it the other way around, I’m not sure. In any event, there are many videos of people doing this particular ritual.
This is typical of the Ukraine, Poland or other Eastern European nations. I like the image and the relaxed calmness of the entire rural community. This is a nice calming video that I am sure will resonate in the one or two Russians that visit MM.
Sure the language is different and maybe they are eating sausages and potatoes instead of hamburgers and potato chips, but are they all that really different from Americans? I don’t think so. People are people and I love how the family gets together and has a good time. It reminds me of what it used to be back in the Untied States, pre-1990 at least.
After the United States has kicked the living shit out of all the weak guys…
…over the last fifty years. The rest of the world has put their collective foot down with a big “stomp” and said “Enough is enough!”. Seriously if the Biden Administration wants to get involved in a war with Asia the only thing remaining of the USA, once the dust settles, will be smoldering embers. You don’t fuck with the Russians.
Seriously this reminds me of what it used to be like. Maybe forty to fifty years ago in the Untied States. You know, long before all the psychopathic morns took control of the government, and made laws, and rules to “improve” things. Fucking Idiots.
Russians like the Chinese love to dance and they have these huge get togethers where everyone dances. Just like in China. It’s nothing like you would see in the United States though. Everyone stays inside and huddles in front of televisions or computer monitors.
Today, Russia and China are very, very close. Putin referred to the relationship as symbiotic.
Symbiotic.
Characterized by or being a close, cooperative, or interdependent relationship
The relationship is strong, tight, and mutually beneficial to each party. They work together on all levels, and with the new global realignments, it would be wise to pay attention to Russia. Yes. Not just China, but Russia as well.
For the last 100 years, the United States has been the force behind the vast bulk of wars, famine, diseases, turmoil, terror, suppression and everything else bad that you find in the world today. From mindless corporate drones, to drug-induced street walking zombies, to massive prison complexes, the the Coronavirus pandemic, the United States has been behind it all…
For the world to move forward and embrace a new and better reality, this evil will need to be vanquished. Just like in the Tolken stories about the dragon Smaug, you need to destroy the monster before the people can live life freely.
I cannot see into the future, but it appears quite clear to me that the destruction of this evil is necessary to make the world a better and safer place. How it will happen is unknown, but it will have to happen. Sooner or later.
America is like this mentally ill alcoholic that is repeatedly raping the children in the neighborhood, setting fires to all the houses, and shitting on the sidewalks in front of your house. Sooner or later, he must go. There simply isn’t any other alternative.
Do you want more?
I have more articles like this one in my Happiness Index, here…
Every now and then, you come across an article that resonates. Not from some unknown blogger who writes about his opinions after reading the “news”, but a thoughtful article by an experienced professional discussing a subject that he knows well. And so when I came across this work, I just had to reproduce it here on MM..Granted, his title sucks. But the content is gold. All credit to him and the source found HERE..
By Byron King
“It Failed Miserably” – What If the US Lost a War and Nobody Noticed?
I have a friend who teaches at the university level — at a U.S. service academy, no less.
The other day he was running a class and posed a short (but profound) question to a group of students. Namely, what was the most recent strategic disaster suffered by the U.S. military?
“Blank expressions,” noted my friend.
After a period of time, one student offered an answer… “Afghanistan?” (And yes, the student’s answer was in the form of a question.)
Dutifully, my professor-friend led the students in a discussion of what happened in a war that began before they were born and whose outcomes will affect them for the rest of their lives.
There’s a Whiskey tale to tell just based on this anecdote alone.
But wait, there’s more!
Because America’s loss in Afghanistan has already been overshadowed.
Indeed, the U.S. military has suffered an even greater strategic disaster than Afghanistan: an epic military defeat that already occurred, and you likely don’t know a thing about it.
I’ll skip to the takeaway here.
The U.S. should refrain from fighting the next war because we’ve already lost, long before even one shot has been fired.
The source for this ultra-defeatist news is not just a teacher at a sailor’s college, sited on a salty bay. No, the source is no less than a serving, 4-star general whose job title is Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Let’s dig in…
Here’s the long and short. The U.S. military conducted a major wargame last fall and “it failed miserably,” said U.S. Air Force Gen. John Hyten earlier this week.
Hyten spoke at a conference sponsored by the Emerging Technologies Institute. It’s a think tank run by the National Defense Industrial Association, an industry group focused on military modernization. (You can watch it on YouTube here, about an hour and 18 minutes.)
“An aggressive red team that had been studying the United States for the last 20 years just ran rings around us,” he said. “They knew exactly what we’re going to do before we did it.”
According to a Pentagon spokesperson, one key scenario of this wargame involved U.S. forces battling with China over Taiwan. From Hyten’s summary, U.S. forces became sitting ducks and were destroyed piecemeal and systematically.
The overarching problem was, basically, everything.
It’s all fucked
That is, the problem for the U.S. was far beyond the shortcomings of any particular piece of equipment, or ship or airplane, let alone the willingness of U.S. and allied troops to fight. No, the issue was the very essence of how the U.S. military forms strategic concepts and conducts operations.
In other words, the problem was the entire belief system, architecture and construction of the Pentagon way of doing things — and certainly of waging war. By extension, it’s a political problem too, as we’ll address below.
“We always aggregate to fight, and aggregate to survive,” said Hyten.
That is, the U.S. military is built around massing people, equipment and munitions. Build up a huge complex of firepower. Then add massive levels of intelligence information, command and control, and targeting data to, as the saying goes, “take it downrange.”
This has been the U.S. approach to warfighting since World War II, with many of the roots extending back to the Civil War.
The war game fiasco
Per Hyten, in last fall’s war game, “We basically attempted an information-dominance structure, where information was ubiquitous to our forces. Just like it was in the first Gulf War, just like it has been for the last 20 years, just like everybody in the world, including China and Russia, have watched us do for the last 30 years.”
But the so-called “blue team” (meaning U.S. and allied forces) lost access to communications and data networks almost immediately. Satellites went away. Seafloor cables were cut. Bandwidth died. In general, it was impossible to utilize the electromagnetic environment, and within moments nobody could talk with anybody.
And “what happens if right from the beginning that information is not available?” asked Hyten, rhetorically. “That’s the big problem that we faced.”
According to Hyten, “in today’s world, with hypersonic missiles, with significant long-range fires coming at us from all domains, if you’re aggregated and everybody knows where you are, you’re vulnerable.”
And with an entire concept of operations poked in the proverbial eyes, red team easily defeated the blue side.
Not just a yearly exercise. It’s the planning run-on for something BIG…
Based on Hyten’s description, this wargame was not just another table-top exercise. No, this was a test of the all-up game plan for the “next” conflict, largely based on concepts of operations that have guided the American military process for three decades or more. And the outcome was a total disaster.
U.S. doctrine focuses on creating what is called a “kill box” for the opponent. But in this particular expedition, from the outset U.S. and allied forces walked into their own zones of destruction. They laid down in their own coffins, so to speak.
Opposing forces wrecked the entire complex of U.S. logistics. Rear bases came under fire, while aircraft and ships at sea were targeted by long-range missiles. There’s just no hiding anymore from people with sufficient technology to find you.
Even worse, most U.S. weapons were outranged by new systems recently deployed by China, much of it based on advanced Russian designs. It’s a long-term U.S. failure in research, development and procurement.
When the balloon went up, most U.S. forces near-immediately lost the ability to coordinate attacks and/or return fire. Much of the targeting data was worthless in any event, while systems used for aiming and guiding munitions also failed.
To the extent that communications worked at all, much of the data were corrupted or hacked.
It’s not overstating to say that, in this one wargame, far from home the U.S. lost vast numbers of people and equipment. In real world terms, think of casualty numbers in the tens of thousands. Of entire bases obliterated. Of hundreds of airplanes lost. Of dozens of ships sunk. And that’s just in the first few days.
The wargame ended with American forces defeated and devastated. U.S. allies were similarly shredded. And U.S. interests in the Western Pacific and Asia were annihilated.
Analysis
To mix a couple of metaphors, the U.S. suffered defeats in a nature that mirror a modern version of Pearl Harbor, the fall of Singapore and a saltwater Stalingrad.
And it gets worse. Because the devil is in the details, many of which have little or nothing to do with purely military matters. The downfall of American power begins at home, not far overseas.
Return to Gen. Hyten’s comment that potential adversaries have spent 30 years watching and learning from U.S. operations. Well, yes. Obviously.
Any reasonably intelligent counterparty — anyone, any country, anywhere on the face of this planet — would pay attention to what the U.S. has been doing and then figure out what to expect and how to deal with it.
Over three decades, people everywhere watched, learned, and totally went to school on the U.S. military. And it’s all because the America made a foolish political and economic choice, namely, to engage in so-called “long wars.”
And that has never been a good idea, going back to the days of Sun Tzu and before.
“Wars cost much silver,” wrote Sun Tzu in his classic book, “On War.” And of course, he meant money. But the subtleties of Sun Tzu’s writing also delve into how war affects both people and culture. Wars drive a certain negative ethic within a political system, and the longer any war lasts, the more negative is the tendency.
Meanwhile, it’s not as if America’s 30 years of war were battles of necessity. Certainly, it’s not as if the country was being invaded and overrun.
No, the three decades of war (Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden) were an era of forward presence coupled with routine military belligerence, oft to the ring of political trumpets at home.
The named wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) speak for themselves. Then there are other levels of warfare, like with Serbia, Libya and Syria, where the gunslinging showed up in a different manner, but still as destructive to entire societies.
In this sense — that sense of reaching out to bomb people far from U.S. shores — America’s long wars are not just a military issue, easily dismissed by civilians as some sort of niche problem for the Pentagon.
No, because closer to home, the long wars reveal seismic flaws in the very nature and character of U.S. governance. The long wars reveal a deep weakness in the American form of government itself.
Indeed, we’re a long way from the sage advice of President John Quincy Adams, that “Americans should not go abroad to slay dragons they do not understand in the name of spreading democracy.”
And look at it this way. It’s not as if the U.S. ever had a series of national referenda on 30 years of continuous warfare. In fact, the past three decades of war overseas were based on the geopolitical ideas of a relatively small, self-perpetuating cabal of elite elected players and policy wonks, in Washington and various brain-tanks. Many familiar names, to be sure.
Abysmal strategic ignorance and lack of conscience.
Through it all, as well, Congress (and the courts too) showed abysmal strategic ignorance and lack of conscience. Because evidently, the country’s voters place many truly wrong people into important positions.
Consider one key episode, the 9/11 attacks and attendant national outrage.
No doubt, for America 9/11 was the source of a widespread, limbic-level sense of wanting to go somewhere and totally smash things up. That’s entirely understandable. And in that sense, America’s attacks on Afghanistan in late 2001 should have been, at most, a punitive expedition concerning Osama bin Laden.
Instead, Afghanistan alone morphed and mission-crept into a foolish effort of so-called “nation building.” And not even the Chinese method of Belt-and-Road nation-building, with highways and power lines, etc.
No, America in Afghanistan was more of a Vietnam-redux. The idea was somehow to pacify people who didn’t want us to be there, and if that didn’t work then destroy the place in order to rebuild it. Meanwhile, one can almost hear the echoes of at least one old bromide from the 1960s, that, “If we don’t fight ‘em over there, we’ll have to fight ‘em here.”
Through it all, and again in a Vietnam-like manner, Afghanistan was not so much a 20-year war for America, as a one-year war fought 20 times by a corps of officers, senior non-commissioned officers and civilian government personnel and contractors who made careers out of it.
At the end of the day, is anyone really surprised that smart, well-resourced adversaries paid attention and came up with an entire spectrum of methods to confront U.S. warfighting?
The Next War…
Come the next real war, U.S. forces won’t own space or the skies. Won’t run the electromagnetic spectrum. Won’t have unfettered communications. Won’t control logistics. Won’t have good targeting data. Won’t have air supremacy, let alone sea supremacy or undersea dominance. And many of the expensive weapon systems simply won’t work in the degraded environment.
Apparently though, it took an internal wargame in the Department of Defense to drive home the point.
Or at least, to illustrate the problem such that no less than one of the most senior generals in the military came out of the closet to admit that America’s super-expensive military complex can’t win the next big war.
On the bright side, perhaps it’s a true wakeup call that translates to progress.
On that note, I rest my case.
That’s all for now… Thank you for subscribing and reading.
This article is saying what I have been saying for years now. America is not going to just lose a battle here, or a battle there. The entire military excursion will be a Waterloo event.
It will be the Stalingrad of all Pacific military forces.
And then, it will move to America.
China will not act alone. Russia will assist.
Then with total dominance of the air by the victorious Asian combined forces will turn all of America into a modern-day Syria. While I do not expect that China will give any mercy, they however, will realistically set up conditions where starving, armed Americans, will kill each other for moldy turnip rinds.
DF-41
And that’s only with conventional weapons.
Right now we are watching as the Pentagon experts and generals are telling the evil neocons in Washington DC to shut up.
Now, I don’t know if they will be successful…
…after all those evil psychopaths in Washington are crafty, deluded, and living in some kind of insanity (possibly drug induced) that gives this illusion of unaccountability.
Xu Guangyu, a retired major general and now a strategy researcher, said that DF-16 has a strike range of more than 1,000 kilometers, filling the gap that previously existed with the absence of a medium-range ballistic missile in the PLA’s arsenal. He said the missile also is able to reach Okinawa, a Japanese island about 400 km from China’s Diaoyu Islands. Shi Hong, executive editor of Shipborne Weapons, said the DF-16 was developed by China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp based on the DF-11 short-range ballistic missile and can carry a warhead of at least 500 kg. The missile has a strike accuracy as good as that of a cruise missile, Shi said. It is also able to maneuver in its final stage to penetrate enemy defensive firepower, he said.
Regardless to what those evil psychopathic war-monsters want, I can well imagine that a repeat of what happened last year in 2020.
This was when Trump ordered the Naval Armada to the South China Sea. Eight assault carrier steamed to China. They were intended to seize some outlying Chinese held islands in the inner island defensive chain.
But you know, nothing happened.
The commanders refused. They steamed home, and President Trump fired the leadership.
Again, we can expect, that reasonable leadership will refuse to engage either China or Russia or both.
They will refuse.
Just like late Summer 2020. And the sitting American President will fire his military staff for refusing to die.
The Chinese are subtle.
They speak softly and kindly and carefully.
During the “heat” of the anti Uighur Muslim “issue”, China responded with a video. It is below. Pay attention to the array of messages that are subtly embedded within it.
The video below is an Army unit located in Xingjiang to defend against insurgency movements by the United States to block the BRI.
If you note, those are not SCUD missiles. Aside from a host of Medium Range ballistic missiles (DF-21 and DF-26), and if you look carefully, the DF-5C, additionally there are also DF-31A and DF-41 weapons presented as part of the defensive force.
What is China trying to say?
Along with the destruction of nearby military bases, will be the simultaneous destruction of major American cities. These missiles are long range city-flatteners.
Look at the MESSAGE that China is telegraphing.
Those are nuclear (and neutron bomb) MIRV, hyper-velocity, (with artificial intelligence), long-range, ICBMs. the DF-31A is capable of hitting every major American city on the West Coast. These are latest generation, decades ahead of America, nuclear missiles that America has no defense against.
If you start moving military against China, China will devastate the American heartland. Any surviving leadership will have to hide in the impoverished American ghettos to avoid the nuclear carpet bombing that will result.
The Chinese do not play.
A final comment
Chinese media has announced (last month), ever since the US pulled that aircraft landing stunt in Taiwan, that not only are military units fully armed with real munitions, and everything (EVERYTHING!) is out of storage, but they fly and run “HOT”.
There’s a high probably the next US / UK provocation will result in “accidental” deaths.
Nothing quite ruins your day like global thermonuclear war. Especially when you are on the losing side.
In America, it’s no longer an issue of “one day the common many will rise up against the evil leadership”.
Ai! It has become something else.
It has become “we need to hang these Washington DC bastards before they get everyone killed.”
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
If you read any of the Western press (most UK or American) you will get a really distorted view about Hong Kong, and China. You will read things, so many things, that you will just “take in” as truth, and without a secondary source of information, you will start to believe it. And that’s how the “West” works. You keep people stupid and ignorant, and manipulate them in such a way that they “dance” to whatever tune you play.
I have been (by chance) reading some articles out of Hong Kong ( I mean, after all, I live next door to it.) and they (the articles) are very interesting in how illustrative they are to the amazing levels of disinformation pumped out of America and Britain over the last few decades.
All lies. All disinformation. All manipulation.
All the time.
We start with Billionaire Tycoon Jimmy Lai. And if you read the American (and British press) you might picture him as a freedom lover for democracy, and a fighter for justice and the “American way of life”.
Not even remotely true. He’s actually sort of like a Chinese version of Larry Flint, with the behavior of Harvey Weinstein , and the scruples of Hillary Clinton.
Here is a great article. Found HERE. It discusses Jimmy Lai’s “operation” in Hong Kong…
Fun fact:
For a newspaper with only 86,000 subscribers. He was mysteriously making HK$95 million every month (12.23 million US Dollars).
Every time the HK government tried to audit him, a massive onslaught of anti-HK government protests, media, and assaults from both the USA and the UK stopped the effort. On numerous occasions, the UK and US government "stepped in" and put pressure on HK to free him and stop the investigations.
But when HK passed the insurrection law in 2020, his "operations" were investigated and it turns out that he was laundering enormous sums of cash directly out of the United States government for undisclosed purposes.
FIRST, LET’S LOOK AT the numbers which are being omitted in reports about the closure of Hong Kong’s Apple Daily newspaper.
NOT BREAKFAST READING
1) Apple Daily printed 86,000 copies a day, which meant that 98.5 PER CENT of Hong Kong’s 6,500,000 adults did NOT buy it with their breakfast noodles.
SIMPLE DECEPTION
2) The Western media is reporting that it was “Hong Kong’s biggest newspaper”. No. Not remotely true. Hong Kong’s most popular newspaper is free tabloid Headline Daily (1,012,000 a day, or more than ten times Apple’s circulation), and in the paid broadsheet category, leaders include Oriental Daily News (530,000 a day), and Sing Tao Daily (253,000 a day).
Hong Kong has always had a hunger for newspapers, and the mainstream voice has always been far, far more popular than Jimmy Lai’s one. That was true in the British era, and is true today, with the same newspaper groups at the top of the pile.
THE BIG STORY IN MEDIA
3) Maybe Jimmy Lai’s paper was top of the web charts? No. Alexa rankings for Hong Kong show HK01.com, Bastillepost and other online media far ahead of Apple Daily (and the fact that Hong Kongers visit mainland China shopping site Taobao significantly more than any local media site should tell us something).
HK01, in particular, has come from nowhere to dominate the local media scene. Lively, up-to-the-minute and often critical of the government, its existence and popularity gives the lie to the “press freedom is dead” trope of the Western media, and is the big story in media that foreign correspondents have all missed.
WHO CLOSED APPLE?
4) Apple Daily was not closed down by the Hong Kong government, but by its own board, comprising local people hostile to China, plus Americans.
The HK$18 million that the government froze was a small sum for a paper for a company with HK$95 million in revenues every month, financial analysts say. The paper itself boasted of having cash accounts of HK$531 million, enough to last 18 months.
In fact, the entire financial picture of the media group is an under-reported, under-studied mystery.
THE INFAMOUS NARRATIVE
5) So why did they close their own paper? As a PR coup, because they were absolutely confident that the international media, which means the Western media, would not tell the real story, but one which fits their anti-China narrative.
Oh, and also, it saves them money.
Apple Daily’s stunning lack of popularity among the good, honest, people of Hong Kong, was only eclipsed by its stunning lack of popularity among advertisers. The group has been losing more than HK$1 million a day, yes, A DAY, (which is more than US$1 million a week), amounting to several billion Hong Kong dollars over the past few years.
The paper clearly did not function commercially as a media company, so any healthily skeptical person would ask themselves: what was it for?
PRO-DEMOCRACY?
Oh, and another thing. Apple Daily wasn’t “pro-democracy” either.
But more about that later. Let’s start from the very beginning, a very good place to start, as the great poet Oscar Hammerstein II said.
This headline from a UK newspaper called ‘i’ (for “Independent”) shows the typically false reporting characteristic of coverage of this story
CHAPTER 1) BRUNCH AND PORNOGRAPHY
I FIRST MET Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, founder of Apple Daily, at a politician-packed brunch party in 1995. It was at the luxurious Hong Kong apartment of L. Gordon Crovitz, a senior executive for the Wall Street Journal group. His wife Minky was the perfect hostess.
Garment tycoon Lai wasn’t how I expected him to be, but I liked him. Behind his sad puppy eyes was toughness. He was in the process of launching an oppositional, China-baiting newspaper.
We all congratulated him for taking a step that was clearly brave and very likely foolhardy: he would inevitably get into trouble.
It was only after I had left that brunch party that something occurred to me: the hosts were all right wing United States people, and the invited politicians were all from the Hong Kong opposition. It was like a convention of people who didn’t like China.
MISOGYNY RULES
Over the next few years, Apple Daily carved its place in the city’s media scene over the next few years, and this reporter, like most Hong Kong people, were shocked and horrified.
Lai’s publications made a niche for themselves by taking the lowest of the low paths. There was sex and sensationalism, outrage and scandal, allegations and celebrity gossip of the tawdriest kind, and worse, pornographic stories and reviews/ critiques of sex workers and massage parlours.
This headline from a UK newspaper called ‘i’ (for “Independent”) shows the typically false reporting characteristic of coverage of this story
The Hong Kong community is a rather gentle, low-crime, conservative, majority female society, and the present portrayal of Apple Daily as the natural voice of the community was and is deeply misleading.
The paper, crude, brutal and sexist, was for men. Jimmy Lai, in a 1995 interview with the South China Morning Post, said: “Our porn page is not very well done, but we have to have it because man has basic needs.”
LOWERED STANDARDS
Other publications lowered their standards to compete, and the Hong Kong newsstands became embarrassing to walk past. Remember the “downblouse” photo of schoolgirl Alice Patten on the front page with the headline: “The peaches are ripening”?
The misogyny and cruelty to women and children were shocking, with people being hurt constantly – and discovering that the newspaper simply didn’t care.
After a few years, it felt like most people knew individuals who had been hurt by Apple Daily. The Hong Kong public preferred its traditional newspaper voice, and Jimmy Lai’s newspaper could never rise above being a minority interest, thank God.
Another Western media group gets it wrong: the information above was distributed by AFP, one of the biggest news agencies in the world.
One 1998 story, sadly typical of the paper, stuck in my mind: Apple Daily published a feature about an unbelievably crass man who apparently sought out prostitutes soon after his wife had thrown their children out of a window to their deaths before jumping after them.
The paper later admitted paying the man to pose in bed with the sex workers for the photographs, knowing that it would be the most talked-about story of the week.
The paper was in trouble with the law, usually because of contravening the rules against obscene publications, every two or three months.
FLOUTED ETHICS
It also flouted basic journalistic ethics. Chequebook journalism was the norm. In 2000, an Apple reporter received a 10-month jail sentence for bribing police officers to reveal information. In 2019, the paper was widely reported to have given HK$1.5 million to a taxi driver for video footage of a married celebrity canoodling with a woman who wasn’t his wife.
Next Digital’s Taiwan operation has been a financial disaster: picture by Solomon203/ Wikicommons
Yes, it also did some positive work, like attacking civil servants for doing their jobs badly, but those few tales became over-politicized to an extent that they were not journalism, but political campaigning for its endless pro-America, anti-China message.
Then one day, I got a call. Apple Daily senior executive Mark Simon wanted to meet me and would like to me to give them some help.
CHAPTER TWO) THE MONEY PIT
MARK SIMON, now there’s an interesting character. People were already wondering if Jimmy Lai’s right-hand man was a CIA agent, given the newspaper’s anti-China stance.
I found the notion unlikely, and not just because we were friends. He was enormous and unhealthy looking, and would be unlikely to pass the most basic fitness tests. Also, he liked the limelight too much to be an agent, although there is a sub-group of agents who do their work in the spotlight.
In a discussion on that topic, someone asked me a related question: If not an agent, was Mark Simon a CIA asset, witting or unwitting?
I gave her a reply that my father’s experiences taught me: “Sweetheart, almost every journalist in the world is a CIA asset, witting or unwitting. That’s how the Western press works.”
Another Western media group gets it wrong: the information above was distributed by AFP, one of the biggest news agencies in the world.
ANIMATED NEWS
I met Mark at a coffee shop in Kowloon’s Ho Man Tin district where he introduced me to Marina Shifrin, an American woman who had been hired to write scripts for a new “3D animated news” venture for Next Digital, the parent company of the newspaper. The operation was based in Taiwan, where the group was doing very badly.
The animations were unfunny, getting few hits and were not being widely shared. Mark wanted me to give her the key storytelling points to creating viral media. It was hard to boil down decades of experience into a short lecture, but to sum up, I told her to be authentic, funny, detached and offbeat. We swapped contact details.
I left the meeting pondering how long a principled American woman could stay at such an unprincipled company.
BIGOTRY
For Hong Kong’s majority population a significant problem was Apple Daily’s undisguised bigotry. Apple popularized the term “locusts” for people from mainland China coming to Hong Kong.
This was a horrific mistake in the eyes of this community, where many people had mainland cousins, and recognized that the city’s businesses were reliant on mainland Chinese customers.
But here was the puzzle. Despite the repulsive content, there was a rock-solid partnership between the Apple Daily crowd and American media people—and on particular, the most hawkish and right wing of people in that country.
Gordon Crovitz remained closely in the loop. Crovitz’s wife, Minky Worden, was “media advisor” to the Hong Kong opposition for several years. Mark Simon had a US Naval Intelligence background and became president of Republicans Abroad in Hong Kong.
Other media highlighted the fact that Apple-style muckraking made ordinary people feel unsafe
Other media highlighted the fact that Apple-style muckraking made ordinary people feel unsafe
HK PEOPLE GENEROUS
To combat its bad reputation for bigotry, Apple sometimes accused others of the same thing. In 2013, it ran a front-page anti-government “scoop” reporting that Executive Council member Franklin Lam, said: “I utterly discriminate against new immigrants.”
Unfortunately for the reporters, the meeting had been recorded and the tape showed that what he actually said was: “I utterly do not discriminate against new immigrants. On arrival in Hong Kong, they are legally Hong Kong citizens. They are also first-class citizens.”
The truth is that Hong Kong people are generous, and the city has an extensive program to help mainland immigrants settle in.
Jimmy Lai meets Mike Pence: picture from Mike Pence’s office
Jimmy Lai meets Mike Pence: picture from Mike Pence’s office
CHAPTER 3) UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE
The world is being told that Apple Daily is a pro-democracy paper. Let’s talk about that. In 2013 and 2014, Hong Kong civil servants announced the results of a years-long process to introduce a one-person-one-vote system to this city.
A Chinese University survey of the public showed that some 55 percent of people were in favor of proceeding with the government’s universal suffrage plan, providing that satisfaction could be achieved on the composition of the “broadly representative nominating committee”.
But Apple Daily and the more strident members of the opposition called for the whole universal suffrage package to be jettisoned, as not being sufficiently close to Western liberal democracy. (In fact, the Hong Kong system allowed direct voting for the leader, unlike UK and US systems, where you vote for parties, and the party or the electoral college appoint a leader.)
FAUX OUTRAGE
The Western media, including this reporter, who was writing op-eds for the New York Times at the time, got caught up in the faux outrage, and the path to democratic self-government that Hong Kong civil servants had taken literally years to build was demolished in a single day.
Many academics and journalists (including the present writer), later realized that we’d made a huge error, denying Hong Kong people an important chance to take the first steps towards a more democratic system.
GETTING IT RIGHT AT LAST
In Taiwan, Marina Shifrin worked until 3 o’clock in the morning and then made a video of herself holding an “I quit” sign and dancing at multiple locations in the Next Media offices.
It went viral on the internet, winning her 19 million views, plus a job offer of working in televison in the United States. She left Taiwan as fast as she could.
REVOLUTION CONSULTANTS
In late 2014, Western “revolution consultants” revealed that they had been working with Hong Kong anti-China campaigners for almost two years before the “Occupy Central” campaign shut down much of the business center.
Leaked documents revealed that Jimmy Lai was secretly handling the finances for those protests: more than HK$40 million (US$5.2 million) came from unknown sources and went to hostile groups in Hong Kong.
In one of the emails, Lai spoke scathingly about the protest leaders, saying they “could accomplish nothing if there was no help”.
MILLIONS OF DOLLARS
Hong Kong was swept by rumors, later confirmed, that the US State Department had a budget of millions to destabilize China by poisoning minds against the country in its outlying areas – Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet and Mongolia.
Piece by piece, stories of unexplained payments popped up. It became clear that the cash coming through the National Endowment for Democracy was peanuts compared to money from other American sources. But it was hard to find the links between the odd bits of news that popped up.
For example, in May 2016 the Independent Commission Against Corruption highlighted an undeclared payment of HK$250,000 from Mark Simon to an opposition politician. It was not clear where the cash originated.
But by that time, observers of the Hong Kong scene noted that we very often saw the same factors coming together: Americans, mystery money, Jimmy Lai, and anti-China politicians.
AIMLESS VIOLENCE
In 2019, civil unrest again broke out and Apple Daily strongly backed the pro-independence protesters calling for Hong Kong to be “freed” from China, despite the fact that between 80 and 93 percent of Hong Kong people strongly oppose independence.
The protesters wanted Donald Trump to take Hong Kong from China, possibly the worst idea in history.
Bizarrely, Apple Daily gave the biggest encouragement to the aimlessly violent people who had no plan other than to destroy Hong Kong’s economy, close the airport, and generally cause mayhem. There was no conceivable way that the endless destruction of public facilities would lead to more democracy, as Hong Kong people pointed out repeatedly in talk shows and on social media.
Indeed, it was obvious that the process Apple Daily was encouraging could have no possible outcome except to cause Beijing to intervene – which was, of course, the whole point. Accusations that this city was just a pawn in a bigger game in which Jimmy Lai was serving the United States became impossible to dismiss.
THE US RIGHT WING
Also clear was that Jimmy Lai strongly favored the right wing of the United States, since they were more actively anti-China. In May, 2020, Jimmy Lai launched a #TrumpSavesHK campaign on its front page. “Trump is a statesman,” Lai wrote in the newspaper in October.
Throughout this period, the paper called for international sanctions on Hong Kong, even though the city was being hammered for reasons mired in disinformation. I don’t think anyone taking a genuinely detached look at the paper’s actions over the past few years could possibly call it pro-democracy, or even pro-Hong Kong. It worked instead to actively harm this community.
Behind the scenes, Apple Daily dug into its coffers to commission a fake report “revealing” that Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden had secret dealings with China. Managed by Mark Simon, the project was a direct bid to interfere in the US elections, and ensure a Trump win.
Again, we saw creative, out-of-the-box thinking, but also an appetite for deliberate deception of the public – the journalist credited with writing the dossier didn’t exist, but was a fake name with a computer-generated face.
Throughout this period, the paper called for international sanctions on Hong Kong, even though the city was being hammered for reasons mired in disinformation. I don’t think anyone taking a genuinely detached look at the paper’s actions over the past few years could possibly call it pro-democracy, or even pro-Hong Kong. It worked instead to actively harm this community.
Oh, and the misogynistic harm to women and children has continued. Earlier this month, Hong Kong saw the end of a court case involving Apple Daily staff pretending to be related to a female celebrity in order to get a birth certificate for her child, which they then published.
ON BOARD
This month, the board of Apple Daily, not the Hong Kong government, closed the newspaper.
Who is on the board? There’s American journalist Mark Clifford. There’s L. Gordon Crovitz, the charming but staunchly right wing former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, who invited me to that brunch party at his home 26 years ago.
His wife Minky Worden has become a key voice in the US campaign against the 2022 Winter Olympics in China.
Ms Worden is a senior staff member at Human Rights Watch, a group which has been criticized by more than 100 cultural figures, including Nobel Peace Laureates, for its “close ties to the government of the United States”.
Since Olympic activities in mainland China always involve Hong Kong city too, the success of her campaign would further harm the long-suffering people of this city.
LEFT SUDDENLY
Meanwhile, Mark Simon, who told journalists he was in Hong Kong to stay, left the city suddenly to move to Taiwan shortly before the promulgation of a US-style security law, which among other things, targets people who take overseas money to interfere in local politics.
But of course none of this will be covered in the international media. It doesn’t fit the narrative.
The Western media will repeatedly report that Beijing is to blame for Apple Daily’s problems in Hong Kong, hoping and praying that no one will point out the key fact that demolishes the argument: The newspaper group has been even more of a disaster in Taiwan, where it has stopped all its print publications, despite the island allegedly having glorious USA-Style True Democracy. USA! USA!
TALK TO HONG KONG PEOPLE
If you want the real story of this newspaper, perhaps speak to the 98.5 per cent of Hong Kong adults who did not buy a copy of Apple Daily with their breakfast every day.
And perhaps spend a moment reflecting on Jimmy Lai’s connections with the right wing of the United States, and what the jailed publisher thinks of Hong Kong’s anti-China movement – that they “could accomplish nothing if there was no help”.
[2] And now to Cuba
Here’s what the Hong Kong folk feel about Cuba. After all, America now has it’s sights on invading it, or starting a war there… oh, you know… for the usual reasons.
Destabilization process is now farcically predictable
THE WORLD’S WEALTHIEST, most militaristic country (The United States) wants to deliver “freedom” to Cuba, a tiny community which has committed the unforgivable sin of doing things in a more socialist way. But whatever your politics, the extraordinary re-purposing of the word “freedom” as a tool to amplify unrest and distort discussions should concern us all.
Hong Kong people, in particular, have seen this entire process before. In fact, we could pretty much write the script for what’s happening in Cuba ourselves. Ten things to consider:
1.) Turn on the anti-Cuba social media
Yes, there are social and economic problems in Cuba. That’s how it works. The destabilization process ALWAYS piggybacks itself on genuine grievances. These are amplified with a disinformation campaign.
At least 1,500 of the social media accounts that participated in the #SOSCuba operation were created in a 48-hour period: July 10 and 11, said Julian Macias Tovar, social media analyst.
2.) Turn on the fake tweets.
Cuban internet investigators found the majority of the fake tweets came from the United States.
The tweets focused on the narrative key word “freedom” and pointedly instructed readers to dismiss any suggestion that the US embargo had any relevance to what was happening.
One of the main pro-US social media voices talking to Cubans was a notorious anti-government source called Yusnaby.
Yusnaby, Cubans wryly noted, is pronounced like “U.S. Navy” said with an accent.
3.) Engage the ‘Bots.
Many of the messages came from random “pretty” faces and were bot-signed up so quickly that they didn’t have time to delete the automatically generated numbers after their fake names.
So “Rachel” (see below), who looks like a supermodel, apparently likes to be known as Rachel76039947.
4.) Fire-hose of messages floods the internet.
The entire, huge torrent of messages took a pro-US and anti-government stance, and many said the exact same thing in the exact same words. They were clearly fake but Twitter did not delete them.
Many of the pro-US, anti-government voices on social media joined recently, have no friends or followers, and somewhat unusual names!
5.) Heavy coverage of tiny protests.
The early Cuban protests were small (a few hundred people) but received far more coverage than much, much larger events elsewhere. Independent media outlet BT News noted that more than 100,000 people marched for Palestine, such as in the demonstration pictured below, at the same time, but got far less coverage.
6.) Freedom™ and democracy™
When Hong Kongers see something like this happening, we wait. We wait for the mainstream media to give the protesters/ pro-US side full ownership of words like “freedom” and “democracy”. At the same time, they will unfairly label the home team/ government as the enemies of freedom and democracy.
Here’s the New York Times doing precisely that in a hilariously blatant manner: “Shouting ‘freedom’ and other anti-government slogans. . . ”!
7.) Lie using fake photos
The small size of many of the Cuba demonstrations was a problem for the pro-NATO narrative.
CNN misleading people into thinking the picture it is using comes from Cuba when it’s actually from Miami, as the street sign shows. TYT repeatedly did the same thing.
8.) American President reads THE script.
By Sunday night, some Hong Kongers watching the process were already waiting for US President Joseph Biden to perform his part in the script, saying something that associates one side with “freedom” and the other with the words “authoritarian regime.”
On Monday, he did just that.
9.) Switch and confuse the videos and images
Below is a widely reprinted NYT report which misled countless millions of readers into thinking this AP picture of a reasonably well-attended gathering was of a pro-US, anti-govt protest, when it was actually a pro-government rally.
Fox News and the Financial Times did the same thing with the same picture. This picture actually showed a pro-government rally. (Spotter: Alan MacLeod)
10.) Amnesty International performs their role
By Tuesday, newswatchers in Hong Kong were waiting for the next standard element in the destabilization script — which would be for the comically biased Amnesty International to do its normal trick.
Amnesty works hard to produce reports making the home team look like faceless killing machines, and the pro-US, anti-govt side look like young, cool human beings with glorious US flags calling for, yes, “freedom” (libertad).
On Wednesday Amnesty International did precisely that, as you can see from the lead elements on the front page of the UK organization’s Cuba report, below.
Amnesty International is “comically biased”
NEXT IN THE SCRIPT
In fact, the Cuba protests have been so predictable that Hong Kong people can even tell you the next steps coming up.
There will be demands for US troops to come and “solve” the problem.
There will be complaints of police brutality.
The UK and the US will say they “stand with” one side, as if they know for a fact that group of protesters represents everyone.
And we’ll all see the same words repeated over and over again — “freedom” on the pro-US side and “authoritarian regime” on the other.
IGNORING THE WORLD
By claiming “freedom” as a sacred principle it owns, the United States has given itself license to ignore the global community.
Just last month, the United Nations overwhelmingly voted in favor of a resolution to demand the end of the US economic blockade on Cuba, for the 29th year in a row.
The United States ignored it, as did the media.
NO SELF-AWARENESS
This week, a US politician used the word “freedom” four times in a single tweet about Cuba. “America stands for freedom,” said the unintentionally hilarious declamation by Val Demings of Florida.
I’m assuming that staff at the New York Times have enough self-awareness to know that the word “freedom” used in the American way is seen by people outside the US as a joke – but I may be wrong.
Perhaps some US citizens have a more sophisticated understanding of the situation than journalists: the humorous meme at the top of this post is widely shared in various forms and appears to originate in the United States. Here’s another version:
But some journalists don’t get the joke. One of the New York Times write-ups about the Cuba protests included a starry-eye quote from a protester: “What I saw today was people seeing freedom for the first time.”
HOWEVER VIOLENT
For more than 40 years, the world has watched the CIA travelling the globe to rebrand pro-US groups, however violent they are, as the voices of “freedom”, and home teams as the enemies of freedom, however well they feed and serve their populace.
Few people know this better than the Hong Kong people. During the US-backed riots of 2019, a Hong Kong friend posted terrifying images of black-clad thugs, radicalized by endless Apple Daily reports, storming into a spotless train station and using iron rods to terrorize staff and smash everything in sight.
His caption: “Freedom is coming.”
And the reason why I started to read some of the HK news…
yeah. I wanted to do a follow up on who these jackasses were who was attacking my videos of bus rides, sizzling Hunan beer, and cheap wine. I wanted to know!
[3] Rich outlet tries to savage citizen journalists
IN A HILARIOUS BOTCH-UP, the BBC yesterday inserted numerous links to anti-China features into an article defending itself from claims that it was anti-China.Here’s what happened.BBC journalists wrote an article attacking China-based “citizen journalists”. The bloggers defended themselves by saying the BBC and other Western media had a clearly biased, negative attitude to the Asian developing nation.The BBC’s editors yesterday printed the article (above) — but sprinkled it with links (see picture below) which powerfully proved the critics’ point that the BBC is biased against China.In effect, the BBC said “we’re not anti-China — by the way, here’s a link to an article showing how China is a dystopian hellscape! And another one. And another one. And another one. And . . “.It’s hard not to laugh.
It gets better. In fact, yesterday’s BBC article should go down in history as a textbook example of self-defeating journalism for at least four reasons.
First, you cannot argue against the allegation that you present a strongly one-sided view by including a list of article links that prove conclusively that you present a one-sided view.
Lee and Oli Barrett, residents of China, have become popular bloggers
SENSE OF IRONY
Second, the article attacks ordinary individual bloggers in China (like those in the picture above) by implying, with no hard evidence, that they receive government cash to do what they do, which is to show China in a positive light.
Yet we all know for a fact that the BBC journalists making the accusation receive government cash month after month to do what they do, which is to present China in a negative light.
(The BBC’s annual budget is GBP3.5 billion.)
Staff in the BBC newsroom appear to have had their senses of irony surgically removed.
Outrageous! A government sponsored media outlet in China offers money to stringers, the BBC said
THEY PAY STRINGERS
Third, the BBC report reveals, shock horror, that CGTN, a government-financed news outlet, now offers CASH PAYMENTS to STRINGERS!
OMG!
The BBC writers mysteriously forgot to mention that the BBC, also a government-financed news outlet, also offers cash payments to stringers (much larger sums). They’ve been doing this for decades.
I know this for a fact because I was a stringer for the BBC for years.
At this point, I became seriously worried about the toddler-level lack of self-awareness in the BBC newsroom.
Jason Lightfoot is another independent blogger attacked for giving another side of the story
MOTIVATION MYSTERY
Fourth, the BBC writers say: “It’s unclear what drives the foreign vloggers – whether they believe in China’s messaging or are motivated by the lure of local fame and fortune instead.”
It’s only unclear what motivates them if you haven’t watched a single one of their videos. If you do, you can see they are ordinary people doing their best to provide desperately needed balance to the reports put out by dedicated Sinophobes like, well, BBC Newsroom staff, to pick a random example out of the air.
LET’S TALK ABOUT MONEY
Actually, let’s talk about money, something BBC journalists HATE to discuss.
The BBC’s hatchet job presents no evidence whatsoever that the Barretts, Barrie Jones, or Jason Lightfoot are paid a single yuan for having the opinions they have, or for choosing to show the positive side of life in China.
In contrast, BBC journalists have very good salaries for showing the negative side of life in China. I hope the bloggers attacked by BBC journalists Kerrie Allen and Sophie Williams realize they have the moral right to ask them how much the BBC pays them.
OVERPAID JOURNALISTS
I’ve worked at the BBC on and off for decades and I can tell you that some BBC journalists get paid A LOT. When BBC newsroom head James Harding left in 2018, his salary was GBP340,000 a year. Election specialist Jeremy Vine gets more than GBP600,000 a year.
Of course most people in the newsrooms get less than that, but at least 40 BBC journalists are paid more than the British Prime Minister’s GBP150,000 salary, a Press Gazette study showed in 2017. Political editor Laura Kuenssberg gets GBP200,000 to GBP250,000 a year, for example.
Barrie Jones upsets Western journalists by refusing the parrot the US State Department narrative.
FACTUAL INACCURACIES
The ultimate irony is that the unpaid amateurs in China regularly do a better job of covering China than the salaried professionals.
The same BBC article gives a good example of how history changes when that all-important nuance goes missing.
The BBC reporters say “Citizen journalist Zhang Zhan was jailed for four years after making a number of vlogs during Wuhan’s coronavirus outbreak.”
That’s not what really happened. Zhang Zhan was an anti-lockdown campaigner jailed for repeatedly trying to disrupt anti-covid measures. She herself said that she was not a journalist. Her own videos show clearly that she was the Chinese equivalent of the US anti-vaxxer brigade, refusing to follow health guidelines and creating deliberate public confrontations with people trying to follow the rules.
But that’s a nuanced version of her case, which you can only get if you live in this country and talk to people here — rather than attack from the other side of the planet.
THE 50-CENT ARMY
The BBC reporters also dredge up the old chestnut about the “50-cent army”, apparently unaware that most Chinese government clickers have been retired, simply because they are no longer needed. They’ve been replaced by real voices who speak out without pay.
An SCMP report about the rise of young people in China defending their community by commenting on social media, making the civil service pro-China “wumao” unnecessary
The so-called “wumao” are no longer necessary now that young people who are sick and tired of their community being misrepresented (groups like the Diba and the fangirls) are providing a robust defense of the country, far more creatively and without the need for payment.
They even create quite stylish memes (see below).
Above is a Diba meme from Weibo
The BBC report also omits the fact that it’s actually US intelligence groups such as the SR (military intelligence) and the CIA which flood social media columns with politically charged fake comments, often easy to spot.
There’s something creepy in the article too.
The “expert” quoted at length in the BBC report is Robert Potter, described as a “cybersecurity researcher”. The BBC omits a key fact that commentator Daniel Dumbrill yesterday highlighted. The top two names on Potter’s organization’s funding list are the State Department of the United States and the United States Department of Defence.
Yes. Exactly.
Think Mike Pompeo, CIA, Anthony Blinken.
The US State Department
So, to sum it up, honest, ordinary people who spend their own time and money offering useful additional views of life in China, from within China, are accused of receiving government cash by distant people who actually ARE receiving government salaries working for a government news outlet and showcasing the views of people paid by the US government.
NEED FOR INTEGRITY
This is why we need UNBIASED journalists covering China and it doesn’t matter if you have qualifications or not — what matters is that you have enough moral integrity to tell the truth: which is that the community we call China is really not that different from the other major communities around the world.
One last thing: From a professional journalistic point of view, there’s another issue with the BBC article.
Very similar articles have already appeared in other British news outlets. Here is an example below from the Times of London.
Same victims, same news angle, similar headlines, similar allegations, similar quotes.
Copying? Or co-ordination? Journalists don’t normally regurgitate their rivals’ old stories in this way.
There’s something very wrong going on here.
This reporter’s father was one of the first investigative journalists in Asia. He had a saying: “Everything is about something else.”
[4]Switching China for the US is a huge mistake
Australia has put itself at a stark disadvantage by casting its lot with the US instead of the trading partner that has underwritten its growth over decadesUS WRITER AND FORMER military analyst Daniel Ellsberg recently revealed that the Pentagon Papers, most of which were released in 1971, also confirmed that the United States contemplated using nuclear weapons against the Chinese mainland in 1958, to “defend” Jinmen, also known as Kinmen, an island about 10 kilometers from the mainland city of Xiamen, on behalf of the Kuomintang in Taiwan.We need to recall that China had no nuclear weapons at that time－only the US and the Soviet Union did.Ellsberg also said the administration of former US president Lyndon B. Johnson had covertly engaged in a range of extremely destructive attacks against the North Vietnamese forces and their supporters during the Vietnam War.‘NUKING’ A DEVELOPING COUNTRYSo the US, at least from a planning point of view, saw nothing fundamentally immoral about launching a nuclear attack on a huge developing country that possessed no such arms.This was a little over 10 years after seeing the horrific nuclear devastation in Japan. Fortunately, the plan was not implemented.
Manly Beach, Sydney, Australia: picture by Simon Rae/ Unsplash
AUSTRALIA AS COURIER
Even more startling, from an Australian point of view, is the recent disclosure that Australia, was, in 1964, given an extraordinary US-courier task.
Gregory Clark, a former Australian diplomat, has just revealed that in that year, Australian foreign minister Paul Hasluck demanded that the Australian Embassy in Moscow (where Clark worked) arrange a meeting with the new Soviet leadership.
In a meeting with premier Alexei Kosygin at which Clark was present, Hasluck carried a message from Washington, requesting that the USSR join the US in Vietnam to stop the “bad communists” in Beijing and North Vietnam to expand southwards.
Kosygin’s response was blunt. Moscow would do all it could to support the Vietnamese people in their struggle against US imperialism – and he wished the Chinese would do more to help.
After the commencement of China’s reform and opening-up policy in 1978, however, the US generally welcomed the rise of China.
‘a popular, genial understanding of China as a vast, poor, peasant-based country’
The US relationship with China has gone through a striking transformation over the past century.
Once, compassion was dominant. The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Pearl S. Buck wrote The Good Earth over 90 years ago while living in Nanjing. The book helped shape a popular, genial understanding of China as a vast, poor, peasant-based country with a remarkable history.
TRADE BOOMED
During the period when the US welcomed the rise of China, immense business opportunities were recognized and trade boomed, generating academic, intellectual and general interest in China.
Now that China’s economy is around 70 percent of the size of the US economy in raw US dollar GDP terms, the US has made clear its huge vested interest in seeing the rise of China strikingly reduced and contained.
Thus the US mood has gone from being sorry for China, then helpful to China, to being stridently hostile to China.
‘China does not purposefully threaten Australia in any serious way’
Examined rationally, the strategic position for Australia is clear. It has a huge vested interest in seeing the rise of China maintained and enhanced.
China is now Australia’s largest trading partner. Before the recent intense downturn in the Australia-China relationship, trade figures show that Australia’s annual trade surplus with China had topped A$50 billion (US$36.9 billion).
From 1991 until the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Australia maintained the longest period of sustained economic growth ever seen within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. China, above all, has underwritten this outcome.
China does not (viewed outside of hawklike think tanks) purposefully threaten Australia in any serious way.
GUSTO AND NAIVETE
The US, on the other hand, does threaten Australia at a more menacing level: first, by encouraging intensified antipathy toward the trading partner who has done more to remake Australia in the last several decades than any other; and second, due to the serious hazard of being drawn into yet more US military adventures－possibly involving certain levels of forceful confrontation with China.
Australia’s relationship with China is very different from that of the US. The acute difficulty for Australia, however, is that Washington has been highly insistent that Australia join in the US-led Sino-containment project. Australia has taken up this damaging new brief with uncommon gusto and naivete.
Collaboration has been beneficial to both sides: Picture by Mimi Thian/ Unsplash
DEEP, LONG-TERM COST
Research by the Perth US-Asia Centre recently listed major income drops in trade with China, to Australia’s stark disadvantage, in areas including travel, education, coal, beef, wine, cotton and barley. In a number of cases, US exports to China have replaced those from Australia.
In 1964, Australia carried messages, like a tributary State, for the US. Then the dark clouds lifted from Sino-US relations for several decades and Australia prospered, independently, like never before.
The dark clouds had lifted from Sino-US relations for several decades, and Australia prospered, independently, like never before. Now those angry clouds are back, and Australia is once again being told, by its best geopolitical friend, what it must do. It must stand up for US interests, which are called shared values, and never mind the deep, long-term cost to Australia’s national interest.
It is an extraordinary state of affairs that calls for deep reflection and review.
MY DAUGHTER ONCE asked me if we were “pro-China”.“Sweetheart,” I replied. “We’re pro-everyone. We’re pro-China, pro-Hong Kong, pro-West, pro-East, pro-South and pro-space aliens, especially the latter.”Why would you be not pro any community or nationality? This is the age of diversity.My immediate family includes Americans, Chinese, Brits, and South Asians, and I have several friends whose bizarre behaviour strongly suggests off-planet origins—and the same surely goes for you too, dear reader.This is the age of diversity; picture by Naassom Azevedo/ UnsplashAt this point, someone will always lean into this type of conversation and say: “Ah, but are you pro-Beijing?”To realize how ridiculous this is, look a Swede in the eye and ask: “Are you pro-Stockholm?” Ask a Honduran: “What do you think of Tegucigalpa?” Or grab a passing Bolivian and ask: “Are youin favor of La Paz?”People around the world don’t generally ask that question.
What the pro-Beijing question really means is: “Do you support the Western media’s demonization of China?”
Now THAT I can instantly answer. Actually, no, I don’t. Criticising others can be okay, if done sensitively and with positive intentions. Demonizing people is not.
Many Hong Kong people are stunned at how so much of the world’s media has ended up like US Republican lawyer Gordon C. Chang, following a Western-penned hyper-critical narrative of China, and blithely dismissing any criticism of his constant de-humanizing of Chinese people. “Demons just hate being demonized,” he explains.
(Chang authored the 2001 book “The Coming Collapse of China”, possibly the worst-timed publication in literary history, coming on the eve of China’s steepest rise into accelerated development and increased community pride.)
But Chang’s hostile angle permeates too much of the international coverage of Hong Kong and mainland China today.
I’ve lost count of the number of Hong Kong people who have looked at the ultra-hostile BBC coverage of Hong Kong and said to me: “What happened to the BBC?” (I usually reply: “Maybe Gordon C. Chang is now chief news editor” and they sadly nod, finding it totally believable.)
Journalists shape their stories to reinforce a narrative: picture by Jorge Maya/ UnsplashMaybe it’s not the journalists’ fault. Andrew Cline, a professor who studies this subject, once said: “Once a master narrative has been set, it is very difficult to get journalists to see that their narrative is simply one way, and not necessarily the correct or best way, of viewing people and events.”
Cline is right. We need to break free from that the narrow groupthink and let a little diversity into discussions.
People are thinking for themselves; picture by Jimmy Chan/ Pexels
What if. . . China wasn’t a giant gulag at all, but a low-crime society which is thriving at astonishing rates?
What if. . . Hong Kong’s security laws were demonstrably less draconian than those of the countries criticizing them?
What if. . . the hundreds of millions of dollars that America spends to try to impose its system of governance on Asia is actually money that would be better spent on other things?
What if. . . China was communist in name, but actually demonstrated a really interesting mixture of good bits of capitalism and socialism in practice?
I have discovered, to my delight, that the vast majority of ordinary people are completely open to such notions. But Western journalists less so. How can a tiny group of Hong Kong people battle global media behemoths?
Clearly we can’t. But I’m not sure we have to fight them. Journalists are not bad people. There are many good ones among us. I expect. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully. Surely!
And those of us who live in China can gently, perhaps, encourage them to see the other side of the story, by sharing stories of Chinese culture, Chinese business and just personal stories of Chinese people being human.
…
In directly related news, the Friday project has been running for a couple of weeks and response has been fantastic. More than a million people tuned into our conference, and the vast majority of people who responded to our articles have been positive. Only a small portion made a response which can be summed up in four words: “Run! Get the Labels!”
To people who throw the label “pro-China” at us as if it was an accusation, I’ll simply give the same answer I gave my daughter.
Yes, we are pro-China. We are pro-humans, sweetheart. And the people of China are humans too, whatever Gordon C. Chang says.
* * *
Conclusion
Just five stories out of Hong Kong. While you might not be getting any daily news reports about this regions except for the “evil communists of China”, the tone of the articles and the over all attitude of their views of America, the UK and Australia should tell you volumes. Please keep this in mind was the next six months advance and “play out”.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Traffic on Interstate 95 is diverted in the area of an hours long standoff with a group of armed men that partially shut down the highway, Saturday, July 3, 2021, in Wakefield, Mass. Massachusetts state police say nine suspects have been taken into custody. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
It’s one day after the fourth of July, 2021.
I woke up this morning and scanned my news feeds. I often just look at the titles. Taking the time to read the content is useless, as most have zero content of worth.
And when I read the content, it was clear that they were avoiding the fact that these were all urban African-american militants who are traipsing in the Massachusetts countryside far from their homes. In fact, they were “practicing maneuvers” around white-dominated communities and villages.
I wonder why?
Why would they do that?
When interviewed and interrogated by the police, they claimed that they were “Moors”.
At least some of the suspects were clad in military-style gear with long guns and pistols, Mass State Police Col. Christopher Mason said. He added that they were headed to Maine from Rhode Island for “training.”
“You can imagine 11 armed individuals standing with long guns slung on an interstate highway at 2 in the morning certainly raises concerns and is not consistent with the firearms laws that we have in Massachusetts,” Mason said.
In a video posted to social media Saturday morning, a man who did not give his name, but said he was from a group called Rise of the Moors, broadcast from Interstate 95 in Wakefield near exit 57.
“We are not anti-government. We are not anti-police, we are not sovereign citizens, we’re not Black identity extremists,” said the man who appeared to be wearing military-style equipment. “As specified multiple times to the police that we are abiding by the peaceful journey laws of the United States.”
The website for the group says they are “Moorish Americans dedicated to educating new Moors and influencing our Elders.”
Police work on in the area of an hours long standoff with a group of armed men that partially shut down interstate 95, Saturday, July 3, 2021, in Wakefield, Mass. Massachusetts state police say nine suspects have been taken into custody. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
The interesting aspects about this entire event are what is not well reported…
These ethnic individuals are not from the region that they were found.
The region where they targeted was disarmed by very strict anti-gun and anti-weapon legislation, thus leaving most residents unable to defend themselves.
The “long arms” were (what would otherwise be reported as) “assault weapons”.
Everyone wore either camouflage clothing, military attire, or black colored garb.
Curious.
I wonder what this means…
…hum?
What were these people doing outside of the quiet rural community of Wakefield, Massachusetts?
Well,
We know that this is not a “new” event.
Coming to rural America.
Meanwhile, let’s see what some of the more learned people on the planet has to say about the current state of American politics and the changes going on in America. And this is a pretty good write up…
Silicon Valley has a monopoly of social capital now. Every call, every text message, and every email is theirs to use as they see fit. This allows them to derive information about the public and use it for financial and political advantage. Tucker Carlson worries about the NSA when he volunteers to carry around a tracking device that records his every movement for the benefit of the Silicon Valley oligarchs.
The great class struggle among white people has also stopped making sense. The old left-right conflict of the prior era manifested itself as a battle between the working and upper classes. The white middle class in America, for example, operated as a ballast and referee. Both sides of the political class courted them in elections, while making promises to their base in the other classes.
The great divide in this age is demographics. America is increasingly nonwhite and headed for majority-minority status. The politics reflected the old demographics, which was 80% white. Fretting over minority rights, for example, makes no sense in a world where everyone is a minority. It makes even less sense when a unique minority is the ruling elite and has total control of the institutions.
The ruling elite has evolved a colonial mentality in response to the crisis, but white people are increasingly embracing demographic reality. The uproar over critical race theory is an omen of what is to come. This intermediate conflict is between a ruling class that thinks it can keep feeding the alligator, hoping to be eaten last, and a public that has no desire to be erased from the book of life. Demographic reality is the new class struggle.
This July 4th, America finds itself in the middle of a great interregnum, a transition period between the old order and the new order. The reason the buildings that symbolize the political institutions of America remain behind layers of razor-wire fencing and armed guards is not a fear of insurrectionist soccer moms. Those barriers exist as a bulwark against the inevitable, protecting an ossified and obsolete political elite along with the political system that maintains them.
Predicting the future is always a mug’s game. Just as our frozen lefty would be stunned to see how history unfolded, we will be shocked to see what comes after this great interregnum. Therein lies the reason to celebrate. The current crisis environment is a transitory state. It cannot last and everything that cannot last eventually comes to an end, usually sooner than anyone expects.
Well everyone is trying to understand
The USA is in a mess, and everyone is trying to grasp aspects of it in handfuls that they can understand. All the time they failure to see the big picture. Things do not happen in isolation. An event here, or an event there, are aspects of a much larger plan. Whether intended or not.
Intellectuals try to intellectualize it. Patriots try to look at it from a revolutionary angle, and socialists try to analysis the functional vectors of group behaviors.
Hey!
Wake up folks. The dinner is almost ready. The bridge is wobbling and the cables are about to snap. The cattle are restless and the fence is about to go down.
An easily ignored aspect of the Tucker Carlson spying story is just how ham-fisted this caper was executed, regardless of the reason. Carlson is a relentless critic of the regime, but his audience is relative tiny. His average total audience is roughly 3 million people per night. Even if every night is a new crowd, that is an audience of 15 million in a country of 330 million people. He may be the biggest name in cable news, but the reality is, cable news is a low impact medium.
This was always the lesson of the Trump phenomenon. The entirety of the mass media, including the so-called conservatives, aligned against Trump but he was able to win the nomination and the general election. These are people who were sure they were the king makers in national politics. This TV carny comes along and walks right through their lines as if they were not there. Then he turned them into objects of ridicule and mockery by calling them childish names.
If the intelligence agencies were what they imagine themselves to be, they would see that Tucker is never going to be much of a problem. They could just ignore him, like most everyone does, or they could use him. Carlson is one of the few serious people on television, but he is still on TV. He wants ratings, so a shrewd intel operative could feed him some juicy tidbits that serve the interests of the regime. Instead, they are in a petty spat and making him the sympathetic victim.
These sorts of thumbless capers raise an important issue. Our managerial elite is rapidly getting dumber. This is plainly obvious in the military side. Sure, rural peasants armed with Russian surplus were able to defeat the US army in the 1960’s, but that theater negated the primary American advantage at the time. Armor and advanced transport are useless in a jungle. Air dominance is not terribly effective against guerilla tactics in urban and jungle conditions.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, the US military could exploit every technological advantage against a poorly equipped and trained opponent. In Afghanistan, the US faced off against a Bronze Age opponent. After two decades the white flag has gone up and the Taliban will take over this autumn. In Iraq, a ragtag force of insurgents led by a cleric came close to defeating the US army. The final peace looked more like a concession by the US, as Iraq is now an Iranian client.
The gross incompetency of the military is not unique. The entire managerial class is suffering from a rapid decline in intelligence. The truth is the system evolved for an adult population of the last century. It reflected the demographics of the population as a whole, but also the demographics of the ruling class. Over the last couple of generations, the people taking up positions in the system are significantly dumber, reflecting the changing demographics of the country.
This IQ decline will only become more acute in the next decade. The great Baby Boomer retirement will hit the civil service harder than the dreaded private sector, because the civil service is much older. The average age of the private workforce is roughly 35, depending upon who is doing the measuring. Similarly, the average age of the government workforce is 50. The leadership class is even older. In other words, the people running the system are geezers, not long for the world.
This is most stark in politics. Joe Biden is so old he has been in office longer than most people have been alive. The leadership of both parties is close behind. Pelosi, Schumer, McCarthy, Hoyer and McConnel reflect the sensibilities and the mating decisions of the disappearing past. Their replacements, Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Tim Scott, and so on, reflect the rapidly approaching future. Repeat this throughout the civil service and you can see the problem. The kakistocracy is real.
This decline in IQ is evident in the current upheaval. The great Progressive awakening of the 1950’s and 1960’s was driven by idealism. They really thought they were going to create a better world. It was also driven by the big change in the ruling class. Jews had taken up positions in the post-war ruling elite. They were making their mark by leading many of the cultural revolutions, like civil rights. Self-interest played a role, but social justice has always been a part of the Jewish cultural outlook.
Today, the revolts we see look like a cargo cult. They are reenactors playing parts they heard about in school. They think if they can replay the events of the past, the past will come alive and the great do-over begins. They are led by a carnival of simpletons and lunatics who mostly like smashing things and making noise. Antifa and BLM are the short bus passengers in the story of street activism. None of what we are seeing makes any sense or has any point. It is just mayhem for the sake of it.
The institutions of a society are the tools of the people running the society, designed for their use over the course of time. The institutions of America were made for people a full standard deviation smarter than today’s rulers. Those tools were also created with certain cultural assumptions missing from the current class. The next generation of rulers are the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey compared to the men who created the tools used to run the empire.
It will not end well.
Conclusion
Obviously some “Moors” are emboldened to reconnoiter the defenselessness communities of wealthy Massachusetts, while the intellectual class are busy trying to intellectualize the turmoil inside of the United States fiasco.
Why?
What gave them the idea that they could do this?
What the FUCK is going on?
I can tell you all ONE THING. This kind of activity would NEVER be tolerated in China, and it would be taken cared of immediately and absolutely. The fact that the United States is unable to do anything… shows exactly what a huge, colossal, and absolute failure the nation it; the leadership is; and the system is. There is only one solution remaining…
Allow it to collapse.
Let the rot fester, then purge it completely.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
The Russians are an interesting people. They are hardy, tough, rough-around-the-edges, and a hoot! to be around.
The Chinese consider them to be similar to Chinese, only a bit rough-and-tumble. You know, like your drunk crazy uncle, when he was caught having sex with the milk-maid inside the outhouse.
Russians are a tough hardy folk.
Here’s an interesting article that I pulled from a Russian resource.
On the internet is a lot of bullshit. many of State sponsored, and much of it just biases and opinions that you read and either agree to, or are repelled by.
What I want to do is throw this article out to the MM readership. And knowing that the likelihood of the article being false, or misleading is high, let’s consider instead the audience reactions to the article. Because this article is very, very anti-American.
Yet, this is a very popular article in both Russia and (apparently now) in China. Remember and keep in mind that Russia is a land of hardy and tough people. They do not tolerate weakness.
Russian women are a force to be reckoned with.
Perhaps we can learn something from the audience reactions to it.
Key points
Congress would never permit American government agencies outside of the State Department to collaborate with China in any way. This is codified into law. Not just one law, but a host of laws, and executive orders. So this article is just wishful thinking from our Russian friends.
Bilateralcooperation between NASA and Chinese organizations is currently restrictedbytheso-called Wolf Amendment, a provision first added to a NASAspendingbillin 2011 by then-U. S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) that requires NASA to seek congressional approval for any bilateral collaboration with Chineseentities.NASA’s China exclusion could mean missed opportunity for Mars InSight
Well, that being said, there is a chance.
So maybe, just maybe, there is some truth to this article.
Interested American scientists and State Department officials might want to be able to get up front and close to the Chinese to observe what they are doing first hand. What better way to do this then to participate jointly in scientific activities.
While collaboration with China is not entirely prohibited, NASA would need to notify Congress in advance and provide certification that there are no risks for a specific engagement. NASA and China were able to discuss the potential for the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to monitor the landing of China’s Chang’e-4on the lunar far side in early 2019. The two sides also occasionally meet for the U.S.-China Civil Space Dialogue. A third and most recent such meeting washeld in Beijing in 2017 while a fourth was delayed partly by the COVID-19 outbreak. The Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is involved in Tianwen-1 science payloads and spacecraft integration, had not responded by press time to a request for comment on the possibility of coordination or release of information.
The effective ban of bilateral activities applies only to NASA, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Space Council. Scientists at other U.S. institutions can, for example, request access to China’s newly acquired lunar samples by following procedures announced in January by the China National Space Administration, a month after Chang’e-5 delivered the goods to Earth. There is no platform yet for sharing Tianwen-1 mission data, but conversations between Chinese and non-NASA scientists could take place, though passing along sensitive information relating to missions may not be straightforward.
NASA’s China exclusion could mean missed opportunity for Mars InSight
Do these Russians look like they are open to new trans-gender policies?
Found here, and all credit to the author, and the same usual disclaimers. Translated from Russian. If you can read Cyrillicscriptyou might be best served to read the article in it’s original form.
If it is true…
.
The Chinese didn’t let the Yankees into their space station? Not a fact. But-the truth
The Chinese have declared Americans undesirable elements on board their orbiting space station. But this news is too … juicy to give her complete confidence. What’s the real deal?
Now, if only you could also read it, so to speak, in the original source…
Unfortunately, my mother did not say to me as a child: “Learn Chinese, my son.” And that’s why I can’t check out the great news that ran all over the Internet today.
But the news is worth posting without checking it.
A hieroglyphic print on a yankee’s ass
Here’s the news. An American application to participate in scientific work on board the new Chinese Tiangong space station was rejected by the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA).
The core module.
A special flavor of this information is given by the addition that
"invitations to scientific cooperation on the Chinese orbital station were received by 17 countries, including Russia," and "an official request from the United States was refused due to non-compliance with standards in terms of scientific value and technology."
If there is not enough color, then the kind authors of the message added more:
"[Russia] has been granted the right to occupy a separate compartment or attach its own module to the Chinese station."
Cool, classic work!
If everything is not so in life, then it is still the same in the current information war as launching an Iskander missile at an enemy military airfield. You can still see the classic caricature of a Yankee, wiry as a crane, falling screaming out of the open hatch of the Tiangong station. And on the most elongated part of his uniform trousers of olive color – a print of the sole with the inscription开开开.
Why do you doubt that the news is consistent with the facts? First of all, it’s too pretty to be true. The truth is usually angular and unfriendly, like a subway passenger at 6 am. So you always have to fight for it. And here it appears in this form, even if you cancel the war – you will not force anyone to go to a military trick.
The Chinese Space Station.
Secondly, the Chinese resource Baijiahao published this information. And this is not some traditional media with traditional ideas about the limits of what is allowed in the handling of information, but just a free Internet platform. Something like the Chinese Yandex.Zen. Because we know that our Yandex.Zen is charming for its variety of topics and their freedom, but at the same time for the freedom of their interpretation by the authors, and in the Chinese version it would be worth going deeper into the links.
But my mother sent me to a German school…
No confirmations…
Life is usually more cruel than our mothers, so at her behest, the minted perfection of German had to be supplemented with the sour porridge of English. And the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) just have a website in English.
But even here, an ambush was waiting: the last message mentioning the American aerospace agency NASA was dated there on November 14, 2014. And it said only that Director Wang Zhaoyao had a conversation with NASA Chief Charles Bolden.
A search for the word USA gave generally mocking results: the second space power of the planet was last mentioned in 2011, and the latest news, where these three letters would stand, fell on January 2020. And then there it was said about the thousand-year dream of the Chinese people about flying into space – thousand-year, etc.
The US agency NASA also did not post anything fresh about its Chinese colleagues on its website. Well, they’re shy, maybe…
I went through the websites of news agencies around the world. The most reliable – TASS-about the described demarche of the Chinese was silent. RIA Novosti published the news that China plans to launch a probe in 2030 to collect samples from Mars. That’s all.
Omniscient English Reuters as top news issues a howl that
Russian forces reportedly fire warning shots at British destroyer in Black Sea.
Well, of course: a peaceful British destroyer (aka fighter, aka, politely, destroyer) entered Russian waters in the Black Sea, and then it was preemptively fired at by evil Russians from a warship, and the plane dropped four high-explosive fragmentation bombs as a warning on the path of the British Royal Navy destroyer. And what right did they have? – after all, the West still insists that the Crimean Peninsula is Ukrainian territory.
The Americans are also silent about their fiasco with the Chinese, as if it’s not written on their trousers in fiery letters: 离开开.
The Chinese really don’t need Americans
So what? Let’s assume that nothing happened? Someone posted unverified information, or even joked at all, threw a fake on the Network-and the province went to write! Our province. Because it’s nice?
It’s not that simple.
The Chinese really don’t expect Americans as partners in space exploration. First, because the Yankees are too much for them, and the Han Chinese can’t give them anything more than what Russia has already given them. Secondly, because the Americans still do not know how to build space stations, and the entire ISS, including the American segment, is still a cast of Russian modules. The ISS, we recall, began with the Russian module, which was bought by the Americans and called its own.
The competencies of manned cosmonautics are much more complex than the technologies of automatic cosmonautics. And if in the latter the Americans still have no equal (although the same Chinese are catching up with them at a gallop), then in the first only three countries were able to achieve something on their own equipment-Russia (in the incarnation of the USSR and in the current one), the United States (orbital ships) and China. Which builds its space technology on the platform of Russian space technology. Sometimes on a platform so close that tears of emotion drop by themselves.
The Chinese Space Station.
And third, the Chinese don’t need the Americans in space because China (thank Confucius) has enough money for its own space programs.
And they don’t need to” give ” the Yankees their modules and their technologies, their medical developments and even bathrooms to finance their projects and their research.
They don’t even need to take Americans to the ISS to use this two-kopeck cab to pay for a place on the station for their cosmonaut.
So the Chinese can afford to leave the тав开开 brand on the American ass. But the Russian letters WENT OVER there do not have to wait…
A typical Russian party.
Some thoughts
The worst kind of propaganda, or the worst kind of echo chamber, are those that reference what we want to believe. Certainly America is hated all over the world, and if you thought that the nation was despised after eight years under the Bush Military Campaigns, you haven’t seen anything yet. Obama started to change that perception, and then Trump drove the perception right into the ground.
Pretty much, the rest of the world considers the United States to be a “laughing stock”.
So, I don’t want anyone reading this to believe it. I don’t. I think that it is a “wet dream” by some folk in Russia.
The Russians have ZERO respect for Americans, and most certainly what American culture is. Maybe I’ll go as far to say that they consider it to be evil. And you can see this disrespect in their responses to news articles. Much like this one.
Yet, both China and Russia have similar cultures.
Both China and Russia have a “bride price” if you want to marry a girl. Bride price, also known as bride wealth, bride token, is an amount of money or property or wealth paid by the groom or his family to the parents of a woman upon the marriage of their daughter to the groom. This tradition is followed by many cultures.
This is a very interesting subject.
Though I must admit that “Bride Price” varies from region to region in China. In Wenzhou, where I met my wife, the bride price was to buy a house for her parents. Most others throw in a high-end luxury automobile, and a full set of furniture as well. But since I am a foreigner, they pretty much accepted the fact that I was an outsider that did not understand the rules. (Phew!)
There are regions, such as Guangzhou that has no bride price at all. Lucky them. But there are also other tradeoffs that you have to contend with.
Russian “Bride Prices” are much more reasonable. As this lady here suggests…
Gilyana Bugurova, 23 years old. Presently a student of the Academy of Law, Ketchenery village, Kalmykia. She comes from a rural village, and a modest family.Bride wealth: six boxes of vodka, one box of cognac, two pieces of chintz, a set of headscarves, a box of sweets, a box of cookies, a box of sweet pastry, a boiled sheep, a living sheep with a ribbon.
Comparisons
Both Russia and China are very similar to each other. America and the West seem to be the outliers.
Just by looking at the most basic and crude comparison above, you can see the Resentment and disgust that the Russians must have for the new progressive America. China, on the other hand, is like the little boy (or girl) who discovers that the Easter Bunny was a made up fantasy.
Russia is a tough land. A cold land. A rugged land, and the people show it.
Russians having fun.
China is a land full of hard working folk that study hard. They, work hard, play hard and strive, and strive to become better and better.
The Chinese work insanely hard, but when it is all done and finished, they party like it’s 1999!
America is a land, that has grown fat and dumb. The leaders have become so isolated from the “rabble” that they no longer resemble humans, but have become something else entirely.
America is an affluent nation. Most Americans do not need to work. So they can pursue what ever lifestyle they desire.
And so the Russians tend to make fun of Americans.
But back to the Space Station…
Even if the American government gave the “A-Ok” to work with the Chinese Space Exploration Agencies, it’s unlikely that China would consider it. They consider America to be a very bad, spoiled child, very unreliable, dangerous, and simply not within the core desires, or needs for the Chinese people.
Keep in mind what I stated earlier…
Congress would never permit American government agencies outside of the State Department to collaborate with China in any way. This is codified into law. Not just one law, but a host of laws, and executive orders. So this article is just wishful thinking from our Russian friends.
I love space, and space exploration, and all sorts of things related to extraterrestrials and so on and so forth. But the entire United States today is just a massive, colossal fuck-up that’s it’s really not worth bothering commenting on.
Consider this…
NASA shifts goal from space exploration to space diversity
NASA has been a driving force of scientific innovation and advancement ever since its creation in the 1950s.
After more than six decades of space exploration, you’d think NASA would be an organization free of petty politics and idiotic logic.
As an agency dedicated to the future, for example, one might imagine that NASA’s top priority would be hiring the brightest, most talented people they can find, irrespective of irrelevant characteristics like skin color, gender, or sexual orientation.
Sadly this is not the case.
Science is once again taking a back seat with the agency’s “Artemis Project,” whose goal is “to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon.”
Again, it seems like NASA wouldn’t notice or care what’s swinging (or not swinging) between someone’s legs.
If the entire crew of the next voyage happens to consist exclusively of people who identify as seedless watermelons, because those are the most qualified individuals for the mission, then it shouldn’t matter. It shouldn’t even make the news.
But instead they’re going to spend $86 billion of taxpayer money to show the world how woke they are.
Click here to read the full story.
And somehow, I am supposed to believe that America is serious about space, technology and space exploration?
Now, couple that with the on-going “any day now the American government is going to release the truth about UFO’s”. Oh, brother!
Well…
The narrative began, and then got hijacked by the neocon military-industrial mafia and got twisted to “the Chinese have advanced military technology! We need billions of dollars to catch up!”.
Well, let’s just kind of sit back and turn off the “news”. Both from the USA, and from Russia.
America is Bat-Shit Crazy!
I am absolutely convinced that the United States today is bat-shit crazy and I really don’t need any further confirmation of it. They are, and while there are many, many, MANY good and decent folk in the United States, the entire system si so broken and such a mess that it’s just a useless pursuit trying to sort it all out. It’s like trying to clean an apartment occupied by a slob.
Notice the lack of ashtrays, the amazing dependence on soda pop, and the poor computer monitor discipline.
Messy Apartment 3
Yuuuuck! This bathroom is horrid.
But at least they have a cat.
But the poor thing doesn’t have a place to go when it needs to take a litter-box break. Ugh!
Living room.
A tenant in a north Houston apartment complex has an overdue payment for more than a month.
No one can get in touch with her.
Eventually the bookkeeper goes inside to leave a note. And finds . . .
Mistreatment of the computer.
The photographer wrote:
We cannot get ahold of her, there is still 20% of the residents out from the hurricane. My manager is FREAKING out.
The pictures don’t show the amount of FLEAS inside I’m STILL scratching
Terrible keyboard discipline.
The tenant’s two cats have been found, safe with a neighbor.
Living room sofa. Why no ashtrays?
Is it just a horrible mess?
Or something . . . more?
Lou Minatti decides:
I am so proud that a Houstonian has created such a masterpiece! The way the cigarette butts are arranged… it’s almost like performance art.
Hey! Well at least the gal used one of my products. Yup! MM designed that clothes iron. Right there on the ironing board. Designed in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and manufactured in the tiny Town of Coushatta – Louisiana.
Anyways…
You get the idea.
In my mind, I think that this person who lives in this apartment, or who did. I would imagine that they were evicted, were representative of the kinds of people (citizens) that the United States government nurtures.
And thus…
…they are the true and real face of the United States today.
And boy, oh, boy. In my mind this snapshot of a Houston, Texas apartment is what the United States government has honestly become. I just wish that Americans can see what I see, and what the rest of the world sees. I almost wish that there was a set of eyeglasses that you could put on and where you could see the American oligarchy for what it actually is.
They Live.
And while they might appear on the surface to resemble polished, handsome and attractive people, with sensible demeanor, polite mannerisms, and a calm wisdom, they are truthfully, anything but that.
They are not what they appear to be.
The real leadership behind the smiles and masks; they are humans who have evolved into something else. And their actual appearance is recognizable to anyone WHO IS NOT READING THE AMERICAN MEDIA.
I need a drink.
Do you want proof?
This just came on my desk.
Congressman: Can we alter the moon’s orbit for climate change?
In a recent webcam Congressional hearing, Texas Rep Louie Gohmert asked an associate deputy chief of the Forest Service if her agency could alter the moon’s orbit to address climate change.
Gohmert said:
"I was informed by the immediate past director of NASA that they've found that the moon's orbit is changing slightly and so is the Earth's orbit around the sun... [I]s there anything that the National Forest Service or [Bureau of Land Management] can do to change the course of the moon's orbit or the Earth's orbit around the sun?"
She smiled and politely said, “I would have to follow up with you on that one Mr. Gohmert.”
She was holding back laughter, but Gohmert was dead serious. He responded, “Well, if you figure out a way that you in the Forest Service could make that change, I'd like to know.”
Click here to see the video.
Like I said.
“Bat-shit crazy”.
Here he is.
Texas Rep Louie Gohmert.
Conclusion
The future of the world will not be determined by America, the West, or the G7 nations. They are “has beens”, and are incapable of reason. It will be determined by Asia.
The only way that American can alter this vector is to engage in a full-scale nuclear war against Asia, and perhaps that’s exactly what they are trying to do. But it will not succeed.
So do not worry about it.
The future is becoming more and more clear with each passing day. Continue to protect your personal life. Make sure that you run your affirmation prayers, and make sure that they protect you and your loved ones from any strange behaviors on the part of the out of control American empire.
There’s a future ahead. By being aware of what’s going on the the rest of the world we can determine what our part in that world will be.
Keep focused.
Be the Rufus.
Our relationships with others will make our affirmations manifest. Nurture them. Protect them. become a meaningful person in your small group of friends and family.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
One of the things that I have been musing about lately is blueberry muffins. You see, muffins just aren’t all that common in China, and when you find them, they are really over priced and part of a dessert menu that is part of a Starbucks franchise, or similar venue. I miss them. I miss the hot piping interior, the explosion of blueberry flavor when you bit into them, and that nice pad of salted butter that melts on the top of them.
They used to be quite common in diners. Almost as common as pies.
Blueberry muffins in automats
But my best memories about muffins come from those automats that my family used to frequent when I was a boy. (Of course in those world-lines automats were much more common than what you find here. Apparently, on this world-line path, automats died out in the 1940’s.) Anyways, my father would give me a quarter and I would get up from the table and go to the little window with a muffin in it. I’d plop the quarter in the slot, and the door would spring open, and out I would take the muffin on the heavy white ceramic plate.
My memories of this are all very clear. And I well remember us eating as a family at the tables. Of course my father would be having a coffee and reading a newspaper. My mother was always fussing over us kids, and generally attending to my younger brother and sisters. I, being the oldest, was supposed to be more mature and more responsible.
Meh.
Blueberry muffins in Salem, Massachusetts
And while those memories are true treasures for me, they are a little dated in that my best muffin experience that I ever had did not occur in an automat. It occurred in a wharf coffee house in Salem, Massachusetts. It was a dark and stormy night and I was riding my motorcycle with a girl, and we pulled into the complex. It was the late 1970’s, and I was still in university.
The world outside was but sheets of rain, dull blues and greys, a howling wind and drops of rain that stung when they hit you.
But through the windows of the coffee house was inviting warmth, a pleasant and cozy atmosphere, and a calming shelter against the storm. When the waitress brought out the blueberry muffin, it was fresh, hot and toasty, and had two pads of butter on the plate that I dutifully added on top. You could see the whiffs of steam rising up off the muffin, and they formed strings next to the the hot steamy fragrant coffee that sat besides it.
A blueberry muffin and a cup of coffee.
Personally, I don’t think that many people appreciate blueberry muffins. It’s sort of the “bad boy” of the muffin family, and is great overshadowed by it’s more popular cousins; the chocolate and the cranberry muffins.
But the point behind this is the little coffee house was a unique moment, a unique place, in a unique time, while a raging storm crashed and banged outside. And while we, my girlfriend and myself, were grateful for the shelter from the storm, the workers were oblivious to it. They had spent all day inside. Sure they knew that there was a storm outside, but they were detached from it. It was remote from their direct and personal experience. They knew about it, but they didn’t appreciate the environment like we outsiders did.
It was almost like they were in their own little protective bubble; a safe world, where they could live, work and exist free of the tumult outside.
Like a hot house.
Hot Houses
A hot house is a conservatory where flowers and plants are grown under controlled conditions. The plants live their entire lives inside that environment. They are comfortable there and there is no reason to be concerned about what happens outside of the walls of the conservatory.
I once visited the oldest conservatory in Connecticut, and it was awesome. It was over 200 years old and had many common plants that we consider to be weeds and plants of no consequence in it. But those “weeds” once they turn 200 years old become these amazing tangled plants with thick and interesting trunks, cool branches, and amazing clusters of leaves.
It was awesome. Absolutely awesome.
There’s a conservatory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that is enormous and beautiful as well. But it isn’t nearly as old. And so while it is a pleasure to go from room to room and experience the different kinds of plants and flowers, it’s really the very ancient hot houses that are amazing. It’s really something else to see what happens when plants live within these stable and sheltered environments for really long periods of time.
Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens …
What I remember the most about my trip to the conservatory in Connecticut, was not simply the cool plants, and the nooks and crannies filled with the most curious of antiquated Bric-a-brac. But it was the very cool diner that we visited on the trip back home.
A very cool diner
Long time MM readers will appreciate my love of diners and local regional stories.
I will never forget that diner. Though I have forgotten it’s name, and location. They had a “blue plate special”. And you know, I am always one for a good “blue plate special”. You know, is it just me, or I’ve never had a “blue plate special” on a blue plate. It’s one of those head scratchers.
Anyways, I had a “blue plate special”. It was a hot pastrami sandwich with cheese, fully “dressed” with a side of coleslaw and a side of “longhorn” fires covered (smothered) in beef gravy. Now, I don’t know why they called the fries “longhorn fries. Basically, they were huge thick french fries. Perhaps three times the width of a regular french fry. Oh, with a iced tea or Coke.
And I, of course enjoyed every morsel of it.
It looked a little bit like this…
A thickly piled sandwich of meat (whether beef or pastrami) with fries all slathered in gravy.
I do believe that one of the lest appreciated characteristics of America is it’s diners. A diner is the lunch counter for the American work force. And in the days when American worked in factories, often they would get a “home cooked” (style) of meal at a diner. This was always preferable to the latest in fast food fare.
Diners are great.
A typical diner interior.
And while I was a munching on my meal, I contemplated the conservatory; the “hot house” that I had just visited. For the plants were unlike anything outside. These plants were not only gorgeous, but huge.
Without the need to deal with weather changes, the encroachment of man, pesticides, and strip mining, they were able to thrive and grow in ways that was impossible in the real, actual environment.
Echo Chambers
We often talk about people being in an “echo chamber”. That is that they surround themselves with like-minded people who echo each other’s points of view. And then, over time, without getting any new ideas, their points of view become stale and more outlandish over time. To a person outside that “echo chamber” they seem crazy, odd, distorted, and mentally deranged.
Indiscussions of news media, an echo chamber refers to situations in which beliefs are amplified or reinforced by communication and repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal.
By participating in an echo chamber, people are able to seek out information that reinforces their existing views without encountering opposing views, potentially resulting in an unintended exercise in confirmation bias.
Echo chambers may increase social and political polarization and extremism.
The term is a metaphor based on an acoustic echo chamber, in which sounds reverberate in a hollow enclosure.
Another emerging term for this echoing and homogenizing effect within social media communities on the Internet is cultural tribalism.
Many scholars note the effects that echo chambers can have on citizens' stances and viewpoints, and specifically implications has for politics.
-Echo Chamber Wikipedia
I would imagine that were the plants to chat with each other inside the “Hot House”, that they would be unaware that they were within an “echo chamber”. And as long as the walls of the conservatory were solid and maintained, they were safe, secure, and could live their lives and prosper. They would grow to become huge, beautiful and magnificent.
The following is a reasonably decent article.
Of course all credit to the author, note that it was reprinted as found, but with slight editing to fit this venue.
While you are reading it, maybe you might want to fix yourself a “Dagwood sandwich” and munch while absorbing the content.
The sales pitch for the American political system is that it is a robust debate between two distinct political parties. The Republicans and Democrats are coalitions of interests opposed to one another. The groups that make up each party are held together by a shared ideological outlook. The Republicans are the conservative party, and the Democrats are the liberal party. The political process adjudicates the disputes between the parties over public policy and the result is a compromise.
In reality, America is a one party system.
It has been since Gettysburg.
The differences between the two parties are miniscule. This is why public policy never changes when the party in charge changes.
The mild reforms of the Reagan years were followed by a consensus that remains in place to this day. There is some tinkering around the edges to keep up appearances, but otherwise the results of each election have no impact on public policy or the priorities of government.
As for those two ideologies, they are just two faces of a single ruling class ideology that is something like a religion now.
There is left-liberalism and there is right-liberalism held together by a common moral framework.
Like the old Bolsheviks, the left side of the American ideology is maximalist and radical. It wants to usher in the promises of the revolution right now.
The right side is more cautious, preferring an evolutionary approach to ushering in the promised utopia.
Unlike the old communists, the American ideology has always existed in a popular political system, so it is built to sell itself to the public.
The main role of the right-liberals is to protect the left-liberals from themselves. They function as barrier between the tenets of the one true faith and any questioning of the faith. The left side is the heart of the beast, driving the agenda and pushing society along from one fad to the next, always chasing the avatar of egalitarian paradise.
This arrangement has worked amazingly well.
Perhaps too well.
It has been over a century since there has been a threat to the system. Anarchists and communists at the start of the last century started to get some traction, but they were never really a threat to the basic arrangements. Otherwise, it has been smooth sailing for the uniparty system for generations.
The left-liberals are free to dream up new social innovations without being disturbed and the right stands quietly at guard.
The trouble is the party is looking like a freak show inside a hot house.
For example, the Air Force now has drag shows to boost morale. To normal people, this is completely nuts (pun intended), but to the people in charge it is perfectly normal. In fact, they think it is bizarre that anyone would question it. They are not entirely wrong, as the people who arranged it will never be pressed on it. The politicians all agree that drag queens are who we are now, and the press echoes the sentiment.
Where the ruling orthodoxy finds itself is in a place where there is never a need to explain themselves and defend their positions.
The right-liberals never challenge the left-liberals on orthodoxy.
Both sides just put on shows where they pretend to disagree, but then kick back together after the show to laugh about it. The right-liberals have insulated themselves from defending their position. They tell themselves that they are simply too good to discuss these things with their critics.
The folks at the Daily Wire are supposed to be the smart kids of conservatism, but they spend their days making sure the hothouse is airtight.
Ben Shapiro’s one venture outside the tightly controlled environment of his life ended in disaster. Ever since that public relations debacle his people have made sure that no one can utter a discouraging word in his presence. In fact, that whole scene has become a closed shop, never interacting with anyone outside their hive.
It is not just the pundits who have become hot house flowers.
Look at what happens to the military leaders when they go before Congress. This guy went before Congress and told one whopper after another. To outsiders, he looks like a complete fool, but inside that room he is just par for the course. Anyone reading this could have wrecked him with a few simple questions, but no one in the room has the intelligence or the temperament to question anything.
This is the motivation behind the mass censorship and de-platforming.
The people inside the political system are incapable of defending or even discussing their positions and they live in fear of having to do it. It is not so much that the critics have great arguments or have superior debating skills. That is a silly conceit. It is simply that the people outside the system, the dissidents, are comfortable defending their positions and discussing them in public. They can take a punch.
This underlying sense of weakness is probably what lies behind the persecution of the January protestors. January 6th, from the perspective of the ruling class, was an emperor has no clothes moment. The torture and torment of the protestors is as much about reassuring themselves that they are tough and in charge as it is about sending a message to the Dirt People. The ruling class revealed themselves to be cowards and now they are lashing out in a fit of petty spite.
All ruling elites have an abundance of sissies and ridiculous people.
They are the entertainment and decoration for the serious men who run things. Those serious men are made serious by regular contact with reality. Remove that contact and those serious men become as silly and ridiculous as their retainers.
That is where the empire finds itself now, ruled by fops and popinjays living in a hothouse. They live in fear of someone opening the door and letting in reality.
Conclusion
And it was well stated.
The American Empire is being ruled by people who have been in the “hot house” for way too long. They have grown large, powerful, and (even) beautiful in a way. We look at them in amazement. We watch their brazen actions, and their odd statements like we would a monkey in a zoo. Curious. Mischievous. Maybe even a little dangerous.
But not one of us.
They, like their ilk in Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, in the Soviet Union, in the Palace of Versailles, the leadership behind their tall walls are slowly losing their collective minds. They are no longer part of society. And some may even question if they are part of the human race.
Such as MM here.
All empires fall, but the rot crumbles from within the top tiers of the leadership.
We are watching this today, in real time. And it’s slow. Really slow. Like a sloooow motion train wreck.
We need not worry too much about their madness, that is unless they start making crazed laws, rules, pronouncements or engage in wars that can affect you. Because that is the great concern.
Truthfully, most Americans realize that everything in America today is a farce. Elections are a farce. Political parties are a farce. American “greatness” is a farce, and “freedom, liberty, and justice for all” is a sad, sad farce.
That instead, America is a out-of-control military empire, and the the much touted “democracy” model is a complete and abject failure.
But you know, that shouldn’t, and needn’t be your concern.
What should be your concern is how you, and your community will be able to weather out their madness.
And yes. It is frustrating, angering, and frightening.
But it is beyond your control. You can either leave the United States of Insanity, or you an stay. Both choices have their good and bad points. I left. But my situation was intolerable and I manufactured a ratty-old tattered “parachute”. No “golden parachute” for MM.
You make the best with what you have.
You make the best with what you have available.
So, guys and gals, enjoy the ride.
It will eventually settle out and over. One way or the other.
In the meantime, make sure that [1] your larder is well stocked, and that [2] you are surrounded by a community that appreciates and likes you. [3] Perform your prayer affirmations. This is the MOST important thing that you can do. By FAR.
Make sure that you are [4] healthy; mentally, emotionally, socially, physically, and in every other way possible. These times are taking it’s toll. Focus on your well being.
Lay out a “spread”. Invite some friends. If you have no friends, then invite some strangers. Just start.
With the basics taken cared for, then enjoy some time in quiet relaxation. That means companionship (whether it is the opposite sex, friends, family or pets) and enjoy some food.
Everyone loves food.
Well, almost everyone. I once met a fellow in a mental institution that hated food. But then again, he hated everything.
This is June moving towards July.
That could very well mean watermelon, corn on the cob, hotdogs, hamburgers, and all manner of fruits and vegetables.
All that calls for a major smunch!
A delicious Cuban sandwich.
Have a beer.
Call a friend.
Share a beer with a friend.
Make up a spread of cold cuts, vegetables, some potato salad, chips, and plan on some chatting. Even if you have nothing to talk about. Come up with an excuse. Have fun.
You make the best with what you have available.
You are never too old for fun.
Make up a sandwich, Or two. Or heck, a whole bunch of them. Put some beer in a chest full of ice. Or, make up some sangria. Or heck! Just have a bar and everyone can make their own cocktails.
Don’t let life pass your by simply because your government is run by idiots.
Make a sandwich. You make the best with what you have available.
Make it fun.
Maybe use some sweet grandmother pickles. Or, use turkey, ham, pickle loaf, and all sorts of deli cheeses on your “spread”. Allow everyone to experiment.
Like this…
Sorry about the “activate windows 10” overlay in the lower right corner. Windows crowbar opened up and updated without permission and now demands that I activate it by providing my personal information on their servers. Not going to happen. So I will need to endure this overlaid message until HarmonyOS is available.
Ah.
Life is too short not to eat good food. Drink good beverages. Spend good time with friends. Whether they are family, animals, associates, or members of the opposite sex.
Just have a good time.
Maybe take a trip to explore a museum, a state park, a pool, a historical society, a small town restaurant, an animal shelter, a fishing hole, or a walk on a trail. Dust off your old bicycle sitting in the garage and give it a spin.
Do something fun.
Ignore the madness in the hothouse.
You make the best with what you have available.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Lately, there has been all this talk and speculation about how the USA is going to “counter” China. All made with the best of intentions by nationalists with little experience, poor or fraudulent Intel, and a lack of awareness at how incompetent the United States actually is today. Yet they own the MSM; the media mouthpiece and everyone desires to go ahead and pick a fight for “freedom™” and “democracy™”.
I have argued over and over and over again that America is very, very fragile. It is more than balkanized, it is tottering on the edge of chaos. And all it would take to send it over the side is China or Russia doing what the US Military is vocally planning to do.
One strike on a city.
It doesn’t even need to be a nuclear strike.
This strike completely collapse “the house of cards”, and all the people in the city will be forced to deal with a very bad situation. Will they come together? Will they work together? Will they [1] obey the advisement’s on the Emergency Broadcast System? Or will they [2] all go their own way, do their own thing, and take advantage of the situation for their own personal benefit?
The answer should be obvious to all Americans.
But somehow, and it’s unfathomable to me, that Americans separate a “war with China over Taiwan”, from “America urban enclaves erupting in an orgy of hate, rapes and killings”.
Because both will happen simultaneously.
China and Russia will make sure that it occurs.
Fifteen years ago we were able to watch what happens when a local disaster hits a city. And it isn’t pretty. I argue that this will become commonplace throughout the United States once the tipping point has been reached.
Are you ready?
The following is titled “Africa in our midst“. It reports on what happened in an American city New Orleans when a natural disaster struck. It is absolutely horrifying. All credit to the MM influencer that turned me on to it. Reprinted as found, all credit to the author, edited to fit this venue.
Africa in our Midst
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which blasted the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005 the entire world saw images that left no doubt that what is repeatedly called the sole remaining superpower can be reduced to squalor and chaos nearly as gruesome as anything found in the Third World. The weather — a Category 4 hurricane — certainly had something to do with it, but the most serious damage was done not by nature but by man.
Much has been and will be written about why the levees that are supposed to keep the water out of below-sea-level New Orleans failed. There will be bitter recrimination about whether the federal rescue effort could have been launched sooner. Commissions will ask questions and lessons will be learned. But there was another human failing that was far more ominous. No commission will study it, and official America will refuse to learn from it. In the orgy of finger-pointing it will be all but forgotten. That human failing — vastly more significant than the ones the commissions will investigate — is the barbaric behavior of the people of New Orleans.
New Orleans is 67 percent black, and about half the blacks are poor. Of the city’s 480,000 people, all but an estimated 80 to 100 thousand left before the hurricane struck. This meant that aside from patients in hospitals and eccentrics in the French Quarter, most of the people who stayed behind were not just blacks, but lower-class blacks without the means or foresight to leave.
Katrina hit on the morning of Monday, Aug. 29. The levees broke on Tuesday and the city began to flood. Before long, 80 percent of New Orleans was under as much as 20 feet of water.
The city’s 70,000-seat football stadium, known as the Superdome, had been officially designated as a public shelter before the hurricane, and several thousand people were already there the night before the storm. It had some food and medical supplies, but when the waters began to rise, people poured in from all directions, swelling its numbers to an estimated 25,000.
People came because their houses were under water, but also because New Orleans very quickly collapsed into banditry. Looting began even while the storm was still blowing. At first there was sympathetic clucking about the need for food and medicine, but news clips of blacks wading happily through waist-deep water with television sets over their heads dispelled that view.
The day after the hurricane, a reporter caught the atmosphere of high-spirited chaos at a Wal-Mart in the Lower Garden District. People were grabbing things as quickly as they could, smashing open jewelry cabinets and scooping up double-handfuls. One man packed his van so full of electronic equipment he could not close the rear doors. A teenage girl passed out, face down, and people stepped on her. A man stopped to roll her onto her back, and she vomited pink liquid. “This is f***ed up,” he said, and rolled her back on her stomach. An NBC correspondent filmed black, uniformed police officers strolling through the aisles, filling shopping carts.
At one store, a policeman broke the glass on the DVD case so civilians would not cut themselves trying to break it, but one man was ungrateful. “The police got all the best stuff,” he said. “They’re crookeder than us.” One woman stocking up on makeup was glad to see the officers. “It must be legal,” she said. “The police are here taking stuff, too.”
Violence of all kinds quickly spread through the paralyzed city, where robbery, rape, and even murder became routine. There were still thousands of people trapped on rooftops and in attics, but on Sept. 1, Mayor Ray Nagin called the entire police force off of rescue work and ordered it to secure the city. The response from the force? An estimated 200 officers just walked off the job. “They indicated that they had lost everything and didn’t feel that it was worth them going back to take fire from looters and losing their lives,” explained Henry Whitehorn, chief of the Louisiana State Police. Many disappeared without a word. Sheriff Harry Lee of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans also said his men were deserting. “They want to be with their families,” he said. “Well, I want to be with my family too, but you don’t quit in the middle of a crisis.”
Two police officers, including the department’s official spokesman Paul Accardo, committed suicide by shooting themselves in the head. The London Times estimated that one in five officers refused to work, and some of those who stayed on the job were useless. When Debbie Durso, a tourist from Washington, Michigan, asked a policeman for help he told her, “Go to hell — it’s every man for himself.”
Ged Scott, 36, of Liverpool, told BBC News what happened when a group of stranded British women shouted to police for help from the rooftop of a flooded hotel: “They [the officers] said to them, ‘Well, show us what you’ve got’ — doing signs for them to lift their T-shirts up. The girls said no, and they said ‘well fine,’ and motored off down the road in their motorboat. That’s the sort of help we had from the authorities.”
“No one anticipated the disintegration or the erosion of the civilian police force in New Orleans,” explained Lieutenant General Steven Blum of the National Guard. He said the city was operating on only one third of its pre-storm strength of 1,500 officers, and that the guard suddenly had to switch from rescue to law enforcement: “And that’s when we started flowing military police into the theater.”
New Orleans has had only black mayors since 1978, and has spent decades making the police force as black as possible. It established a city-residency requirement for officers to keep suburban whites from applying for jobs, and lowered recruitment standards so blacks could pass them. Katrina blew away any pretence that the force was competent.
(On September 5, exactly a week after the hurricane, Mayor Ray Nagin offered to pay for the entire police force, firefighters, and city emergency workers to go on five-day vacations — with their families — to Las Vegas or some other destination. He said there were enough National Guard in the city to maintain order, and that his men “have been through a lot.” He brushed off suggestions that this was dereliction of duty. He even asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to pay for the vacations, but FEMA refused. “We haven’t turned over control of the city,” a city spokesman explained. “We’re going to leave a skeleton force — about 20 percent of the department — for leadership and liaison with the troops while we get some rest.”)
New Orleans has a high crime rate at the best of times — it is usually in top contention for the American city with the highest murder rate — and looted firearms spilled into the street. Some blacks fired on any symbol of authority, blazing away at rescue helicopters and Coast Guard vessels. Several days after the hurricane, with desperate people still huddled on rooftops, FEMA said it was too dangerous to attempt rescues.
On Wednesday, along one stretch of Highway 10, hundreds of volunteer firefighters, auxiliary coastguardmsmen and citizens with small boats were eager to reach people, but could not set out because of sniper fire. “We are trying to do our job here but we can’t if they are shooting at us,” explained Major Joey Broussard of the Louisiana State Fisheries and Wildlife Division. “We don’t know who and we don’t know why, but we don’t want to get in a situation of having to return fire out there,” he said.
Perhaps the most chilling accounts were from hospitals, where staff desperately tried to move patients up stairs as the water rose, while blacks looted the floors below. Most hospitals had emergency generators, but these began to give out. Two days after the hurricane, the city had no running water, and as food ran out, doctors and nurses gave themselves intravenous feedings to keep going.
Just outside New Orleans, gunmen held up a supply truck carrying food, water, and medical supplies that were on their way to a 203-bed hospital. Patients all across the city eventually had to be taken out, but rescuers met resistance. Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan told reporters at an emergency headquarters: “Hospitals are trying to evacuate. At every one of them, there are reports that as the helicopters come in people are shooting at them, saying, ‘You better come get my family.’” An effort to evacuate patients and staff from Charity Hospital in downtown New Orleans was stopped by sniper fire. Other hospitals reported gangs of looters attacking and overturning ambulances.
Chris Lawrence, a reporter with CNN, filed a report from the roof of a police station: “Right now it’s the only safe place to be in the city. We were on the street earlier but the police said under no circumstances would you be safe on the street. They said anybody walking in the streets of New Orleans is basically taking their life in their hands. . . . They directed some of the young women to get off the street immediately.”
What may have been the most shocking headline of the entire crisis was in the September 2 issue of Army Times: “Troops Begin Combat Operations in New Orleans.” The article was about the Louisiana National Guard massing near the Superdome in preparation for a citywide security mission. “This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones explained. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.” The amphibious assault ship Bataan was in the area, but kept its helicopters on board after pilots reported sniper fire.
Many soldiers came under gunfire from civilians. “I never thought that as a National Guardsman I would be shot at by other Americans,” said Philip Baccus of the 527th Engineer Battalion. “And I never thought I’d have to carry a rifle when on a hurricane relief mission. This is a disgrace.” Cliff Ferguson of the same battalion added: “You have to think about whether it is worth risking your neck for someone who will turn around and shoot at you. We didn’t come here to fight a war. We came here to help.”
Michael Brown, head of FEMA, said: “We are working under conditions of urban warfare.” General Blum of the National Guard said half of the 7,000 guardsmen under his command had just returned from overseas assignments and were “highly proficient in the use of lethal force.” He promised to deal with thugs “in a quick and efficient manner.”
Shoot-to-kill orders were supposed to have gone out, and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco boasted that battle-hardened veterans would put down the violence in no time. However, there were few accounts of soldiers firing their weapons. The London Times reported that a New Orleans policeman explained through tears that he had seen bodies riddled with bullets, and one man with the top of his head shot off. He said looters were armed with stolen AK-47 rifles, and that the police were outgunned just like in Somalia. “It’s a war-zone, and they’re [the federal government] not treating it like one,” he said.
We will never know the full extent of the mayhem blacks loosed on their own city. Many victims will not be found for weeks or even months, rotted beyond recognition, their killers never found. Drowned or murdered, the bloated, stinking bodies that turn up by the hundreds will look much the same. In their haste to get cadavers off the streets, the authorities may not worry much about cause of death.
From Hurricane to Jungle
In the two main refugee centers, however — the Superdome and the Convention Center — too many people witnessed the degeneracy for it to be ignored. The first refugees had arrived at the Superdome the day before the hurricane, on Sunday, August 28. The last finally left the stadium on Saturday, Sept, 3, so some people may have spent nearly a week in what, after the toilets began to overflow, became known as the “Sewerdome.”
Preparation for refugees was pitifully inadequate. By day, as many as 25,000 people sweltered in temperatures that rose into the 100s. Whatever order had been established soon melted away, and the stadium reverted to the jungle. Young men robbed and raped with impunity. Occasional gunshots panicked the crowd. At least one man committed suicide by throwing himself off a high deck and splattering onto the playing field. Bodies of the murdered, and of infants and the elderly who died of heat exhaustion began to accumulate. Six babies were born in the stadium. Charles Womack, a 30-year-old roofer, said he saw one man beaten to death, and was, himself beaten with a pipe. Crack addicts — who had brought their most valuable possession with them — smoked openly and fought over drugs.
A group of about 30 British students were among the very small number of whites in the stadium, where they spent four harrowing days. Jamie Trout, 22, an economics major, wrote that the scene “was like something out of Lord of the Flies,” with “people shouting racial abuse about us being white.” One night, word came that the power was failing, and that there was only ten minutes’ worth of gas for the generators. Zoe Smith, 21, from Hull, said they all feared for their lives: “All us girls sat in the middle while the boys sat on the outside, with chairs as protection,” she said. “We were absolutely terrified, the situation had descended into chaos, people were very hostile and the living conditions were horrendous.” She said that even during the day, “when we offered to help with the cleaning, the locals gave us abuse.”
Mr. Trout said the National Guard finally recognized how dangerous the threat was from blacks, and moved the British under guard to the basketball area, which was safer. “The army warned us to keep our bags close to us and to grip them tight,” he said, as they were escorted out. Twenty-year-old Jane Wheeldon credited one man in particular, Sgt. Garland Ogden, with getting the Britons safely out. “He went against a lot of rules to get us moved,” she said.
Australian tourists stuck in the Superdome had the same experience. Bud Hopes, a 32-year-old man from Kangaroo Point, Brisbane, took control and may have saved many lives. As the stadium reverted to anarchy, he realized whites were in danger, and gathered tourists together for safety. “There were 65 of us altogether so we were able to look after each other, especially the girls who were being grabbed and threatened,” said Mr. Hopes. They organized escorts for women who had to go to the toilet or for food, and set up a roster of men to stand guard while others slept. “We sat through the night just watching each other, not knowing if we would be alive in the morning,” Mr. Hopes said. “Ninety-eight percent of the people around the world are good,” he said; “in that place 98 per cent of the people were bad.”
John McNeil of Coorparoo in Brisbane tells what happened when their group, too, heard the lights were about to go out: “I looked at Bud [Hopes] and said, ‘That will be the end of us.’ The gangs had already eyed us off. If the lights had gone out we would have been in deep trouble. We were sitting there praying for a miracle and the lights stayed on.” Mr. Hopes said the Australians owed their lives to a National Guardsman who broke the rules and got whites out to a medical center past seething crowds of blacks.
Peter McNeil of Brisbane told the Australian AP that his son John was one of the 65 who managed to get out. The blacks were reportedly so hostile “they would stab you as soon as look at you.” “He’s never been so scared in his life,” explained Mr. McNeil. “He just said they had to get out of the dark. Otherwise, another night, he said, they would have been gone.” No American newspaper wrote about what these white tourists went through.
When guardsmen began to show up in force on Sept. 1 and take control, some blacks met them with cheers, but others shouted obscenities. Capt. John Pollard of the Texas Air National Guard said 20,000 people were in the dome when the evacuation began, but thousands more appeared from surrounding areas when word got out that there were buses leaving town. Soldiers held their M-16s and grenade-launchers at the ready, and kept a sharp eye out for snipers.
That same day, when it was time to board buses for Houston, soldiers had trouble controlling the crowd. People at the back of the mob crushed the people in front against barricades soldiers put up to control the flow. Many people continued to yell obscenities whenever a patrol went by. Some were afraid of losing their place in line and defecated where they stood. The Army Times reported that Sgt. 1st Class Ron Dixon of the Oklahoma National Guard, who had recently come home from Afghanistan, said he was struck by the fact Afghanis wanted to help themselves, but that the people of New Orleans only wanted others to help them.
By the evening of Sept. 3, the Superdome was finally evacuated, but the state-of-the-art stadium was a reeking cavern of filth, human waste, and an unknown number of corpses. It, too, had been looted of everything not bolted down. Janice Singleton was working at the stadium when the storm hit. She said she was robbed of everything, even her shoes. As for the building: “They tore that dome apart,” she said sadly. “They tore it down. They taking everything out of there they can take.”
Only afterwards did the public learn there were 50 police officers assigned to the Superdome, but they appear to have been completely ineffectual. Toni Blanco, a 24-year veteran, said police could not arrest anyone because there was no place to hold suspects, and they were afraid to use their guns for fear of the crowd. “You felt helpless in the sense there was absolutely nothing we could do for the city,” she said. What did she do at night, when conditions were worst? She and another officer, Alecia Wright, would slip out to a patrol car and have a good cry. “Many times we laid in the car and tears just rolled,” said Miss Blanco. Some officers simply abandoned their posts and fled the Superdome.
Conditions were even worse at the Convention Center. Although on high ground not far from the stadium, it had not been designated as a shelter. It was, however, beyond reach of the high water, and soon some 20,000 people were huddled in its cavernous halls. There were no supplies or staff, and for several days neither FEMA nor the National Guard seems to have known anyone was there.
Armed gangs took control, and occasional gunshots caused panic. There was no power, and at night the center was plunged into complete darkness. Degeneracy struck almost immediately, with rapes, robbery, and murder. Terrible shrieking tore through the night, but no one could see, or dared to move. When Police Chief Eddie Compass heard what was happening, he sent a squad of 88 officers to investigate. They were overwhelmed by superior forces and retreated, leaving thousands to the mercy of criminals.
It was not until Sept. 2 — four days after the hurricane — that a force of 1,000 National Guardsmen finally took over from the armed gangs. “Had we gone in with a lesser force we may have been challenged, [and] innocents may have been caught in a fight,” explained Gen. Blum.
Sitting with her daughter and other relatives, Trolkyn Joseph, 37, told a reporter that men had wandered the center at night raping and murdering children. She said she found a dead 14-year old girl at 5 a.m. on Friday morning, four hours after the girl went missing. “She was raped for four hours until she was dead,” Miss Joseph said through tears. “Another child, a seven-year old boy, was found raped and murdered in the kitchen freezer last night.”
Africa Brumfield, 32, explained that women were in particular fear: “There is rapes going on here. Women cannot go to the bathroom without men. They are raping them and slitting their throats.” Donald Anderson, 43, was at the convention center with his wife, who was six months pregnant: “We circled the chairs like wagons because at night there are stampedes,” he said. “We had to survive.”
The very few whites in the crowd were terrified. Eighty-year-old Selma Valenti, who was with her husband, said blacks threatened to kill them on Thursday, Sept. 1. “They hated us. Four young black men told us the buses were going to come last night and pick up the elderly so they were going to kill us,” she said, sobbing. Presumably, the blacks wanted to take their places on the buses.
The center was not entirely without a form of rough justice. A National Guardsman reported that a man who had raped and killed a young girl in the bathroom was caught by the crowd — which beat him to death.
At one time there were as many as seven or eight corpses in front of the center, some of them with blood streaming from bullet wounds. Inside, there was an emergency morgue, but a National Guardsman refused to let a Reuters photographer take pictures. “We’re not letting anyone in there anymore,” he said. “If you want to take pictures of dead bodies, go to Iraq.” By Saturday, Sept. 3, the center was mostly cleared of the living. Refugees pulled shirts over their noses trying to block out the smell as they walked past rotting bodies.
Later it would be learned there were 30 to 40 bodies piled into the convention center’s freezer, almost all of them murder victims. Arkansas National Guardsman Mikel Brooks showed a reporter the charnel house: “I ain’t got the stomach for it, even after what I saw in Iraq. In Iraq, it’s one-on-one. It’s war. It’s fair. Here, it’s just crazy. It’s anarchy. . . . And this is America. This is just 300 miles south of where I live.”
For the city as a whole, not even 50,000 soldiers and federal rescue workers could bring calm. On Sunday, Sept. 4, contractors working for the US Army Corps of Engineers came under fire. Their police escort returned fire and killed four attackers.
On Monday, Sept, 5, a week after the hurricane and after virtually everyone who wanted to get out was gone, there was still widespread banditry. “We’re having some pretty intense gun battles breaking out around the city,” said Capt. Jeff Winn of the New Orleans SWAT team. “Armed gangs of from eight to 15 young men are riding around in pickup trucks, looting and raping.”
Brian McKay was one of 300 Arkansas guardsmen just back from Iraq. He was in full battle gear, including body armor, putting down insurgents. “It’s like Baghdad on a bad day,” he said. Another Arkansan veteran under fire agreed: “It’s just so much like Iraq, it’s not funny, except for all the water, and they speak English.”
Since the old jail was flooded, police set up a holding pen at the Greyhound bus terminal. State Attorney General Charles Foti said there were plans for a temporary court system, but no one knew how they were going to assemble juries or call witnesses. The grim business began of combing the drowning city for corpses and the remaining survivors.
Reactions
The world reacted with astonishment to sights it never expected to see in America. “Anarchy in the USA,” read the headline in Britain’s best-selling newspaper, The Sun. “Apocalypse Now,” said Handelsblatt in Germany. Mario de Carvalho, a veteran Portuguese cameraman, who covers the world’s trouble spots, said he saw the bodies of babies and old people along the highways leading out of New Orleans. “It’s a chaotic situation. It’s terrible. It’s a situation we generally see in other countries, in the Third World,” he said.
Some Third-Worlders would have been insulted. “I am absolutely disgusted,” said Sajeewa Chinthaka, 36, of the looters. The Sri Lanka native added: “After the tsunami our people, even the ones who lost everything, wanted to help the others who were suffering. Not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged. Now with all this happening in the U.S. we can easily see where the civilized part of the world’s population is.”
In the United States, the stark contrast between endless scenes of appalling behavior by blacks and rescue personnel who were almost all white was greeted with the standard foolishness. Some people accused the “biased” media of suppressing footage of rampaging whites and heroic black helicopter pilots.
Many blacks made excuses for looters. “Desperate people do desperate things,” said US Rep. Diane Watson of California. Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. from Illinois, said we must not judge harshly: “Who are we to say what law and order should be in this unspeakable environment?” Rep. Melvin Watt, North Carolina Democrat and chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, was perhaps the greatest ass of all: “Whatever is being taken could not be used by anyone else anyway,” he said.
Many blacks took it for granted that federal relief was slow because the victims were black. Rep. Elijah Cummings said “poverty, age and skin color” determined who lived and who died. Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau, blasted “disparate treatment” of Katrina victims. “Many black people feel that their race, their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a factor in the response,” explained Jesse Jackson, Sr. He said the rubbish outside the Convention Center made the place look “like the hull of a slave ship.” Black activist and reparations-booster Randall Robinson said the relief effort was the “defining watershed moment in America’s racial history.” He said he had “finally come to see my country for what it really is. A monstrous fraud.”
Democratic Rep. Carolyn Kilpatrick of Michigan said she was “ashamed of America and . . . of our government.” The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin — the man who gave city workers a vacation when the feds arrived — shouted and wept on local radio, demanding of federal officials: “Get off your asses, and let’s do something.” There was an undercurrent of fury at a meeting of black leaders in Detroit. One audience member wanted to know whether the slow federal response was “black genocide.” Another shouted, “African Americans built this nation. Descendants of slaves are being allowed to die.”
One black man, observing the chaos from abroad, took a different view. Leighton Levy wrote in the Sept. 2 Jamaica Star: “I am beginning to believe that black people, no matter where in the world they are, are cursed with a genetic predisposition to steal, murder, and create mayhem.” He wanted to know why there was no footage of white looters: “Is it that the media are not showing pictures of them looting and robbing? Or is it that they are too busy trying to stay alive, waiting to be rescued, and hiding from the blacks?”
Most blacks and many whites fell into the usual assumptions about omnipotent white government and helpless Negroes. If black people were suffering it was because whites had not done enough for them. It did not occur to them that it was the responsibility of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana — not the federal government — to prepare for hurricanes. Before the storm, Mayor Nagin issued a mandatory evacuation only under pressure from the Bush administration. The mayor then did nothing to enforce the order, leaving hundreds of city buses and school buses to drown, rather than use them to offer transportation to people without cars.
Something of the mood of black New Orleans was caught by Fox News film crews as late as Sunday, Sept. 4. White volunteers were trying to persuade a black woman and her small children to leave her flooded house. “You’ve got to get out,” they explained. “The water isn’t going away.” A black man at the top of a multi-story building told a helicopter crew he didn’t need to leave. All he needed was some supplies.
These people could not understand something that was obvious to the whole world: New Orleans had no electricity, no plumbing, no transport, and no food. Blacks refused to leave their flooded homes, even though to stay meant near-certain death.
Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff noted how crazy it was to stay in the wreckage. “That is not a reasonable alternative,” he said. “We are not going to be able to have people sitting in houses in the city of New Orleans for weeks and months while we de-water and clean this city.”
FEMA reported that it had pulled three Carnival Cruise Lines ships from commercial duty to shelter the blacks of New Orleans. Maybe the chance of berth on the Ecstasy, the Sensation or the Holiday would be enough to drag them out of the muck.
Lessons
Ninety-nine percent of the white people left New Orleans when the evacuation order went out. Some 80,000 blacks could not or would not leave. Whites did not “leave them behind,” as the editorial writers keep telling us. No one could have gotten some of them to leave — a number of men cheerfully admitted they stayed in town to loot — but if it was anyone’s job to give them the option, it was that of the black-run city government. Of the blacks who stayed, probably only a minority committed crimes, but they were enough to turn the city into a hell hole. Some did unspeakable things: loot hospitals, fire on rescue teams, destroy ambulances. No amount of excuse-making and finger-pointing can paper over degeneracy like that. Black people — and only black people — did these things.
The Superdome and the Convention Center were certainly unpleasant places to spend three or four days, but 50,000 whites would have behaved completely differently. They would have established rules, organized supplies, cared for the sick and dying. They would have organized games for children. The papers would be full of stories of selflessness and community spirit.
Natural disasters usually bring out the best in people, who help neighbors and strangers alike. For blacks — at least the lower-class blacks of New Orleans — disaster was an excuse to loot, rob, rape and kill.
Our rulers and media executives will try to turn the story of Hurricane Katrina into yet another morality tale of downtrodden blacks and heartless whites, but pandering of this kind fools fewer and fewer people.
Many whites will realize — some for the first time — that we have Africa in our midst, that utterly alien Africa of road-side corpses, cruelty, and anarchy that they thought could never wash up on these shores.
To be sure, the story of Hurricane Katrina does have a moral for anyone not deliberately blind. The races are different. Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western Civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.
And in a crisis, Western Civilization disappears overnight.
Conclusion
America is fragile.
What happens when an EMP wipes out all communication, vehicular traffic, internet, and batteries? Who will come out of the balkanized enclaves? And what will they do?
The writing has been on the wall for some time, and now hate has been institutionalized, and the social structure is gone. It is in tatters. America is a wreck, and the ruling oligarchy really isn’t aware at the actual fragility of America.
If they were (aware) they would be conducting emergency domestic rebuilding, and hiring.
They would NOT be constructing trillion-dollar spending campaigns on the military “to counter” anyone.
And they most certainly wouldn’t be giving away trillion-dollars to any other nations for a counter program for the BRI.
Instead, they would be spending money and time dealing with the festering problems that exists right now. That means all sorts of restructuring of local and state and federal governments, wholesale readjustments of federal agencies, and many, many rebuilding programs at the LOCAL LEVEL. Not throwing away money at the FEDERAL LEVEL.
But they are not.
Instead we see the nation gearing up for a major war with either China or Russia. And trust me, it will be against both simultaneously.
What will happen after the missiles fly is anyone’s guess. But I am leaning strongly on a short-war, with both Russia and China being victorious. And America absolutely, completely and utterly, devastated; broken and destroyed in every single conceivable way.
Are you all ready for a devastated America?
Do you have any idea what that means? Do you have any idea what it will be like for the people inside of America? A balkanized racist America?
Guess.
Coming to your neighborhood soon.
Now, a word about whether this might come about…
I wrote this back over a year ago. And the events of the last few months put everything in a stunning new light…
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
A lot of interesting articles out lately concerning Geo-Politics. Most of which are unavailable on Google or in the states. As they are “shadow banned”. I want to chat about some of the stuff that’s “out there”. And in this post I am going to throw a lot of the banned stuff out for you all to absorb.
But first, let me take a sip of tea.
You know, I have come to enjoy Earl Grey Tea. It’s got this lovely aroma, a nice soothing feel, and is wholly enjoyable to drink. But I do not drink it every day. Sometimes I drink roasted Oolong tea. And I have become a fan of green tea. It’s healthier for you, don’t you know.
Earl Grey Tea.
With the Earl Grey Tea, I like to drink it UK / Australian style. Nicely seeped in a pot, poured into a a nice cup sitting on a saucer, and I add some sugar and milk. Though it’s not all that proper. I do enjoy it that way.
This is how a “real” (an authentic) British person (man, or woman, or “thing”) makes a cup of tea.
How to Make a “Proper” Cup of Tea (British Tea, that is)
Tea is an institution in the UK. Its fibers are woven into the British culture in such a way that it is difficult to describe to a “non-Brit.” I came across this video a while ago and was so awed by the impact a beverage can have on a country.
FYI to Americans, Eastenders is a popular soap-opera type show in the UK. When the show finishes, most viewers turn the kettle on for a cup of tea resulting in a huge surge for electricity! Who’d figure?
The British love their tea. I wonder if people in Singapore drink tea properly like the British do?
I put “proper” in quotation marks because this is my version of how to make a proper cup of tea. It’s not the “proper-proper” tea made with loose leaf tea, of course. That’s more for a leisurely afternoon tea, but this is an everyday process with tea bags which is less time consuming.
In the UK they say to put one teabag per person and “one for the pot.” However, in my opinion that’s too strong for most people in the US and Canada who are used to a weaker tea.
If you are using a British brand of tea, which is already much stronger and has a lot more flavor than most US tea brands, you might just want to use a teabag per person.
Three teabags for a 32 ounce pot, not completely filled to the rim (about 4 cups of tea) is perfect for a fine British family, but you can just adjust accordingly.
First of all, a proper-proper cup of tea is made with loose leaf tea, but most of us don’t have time for that on a daily basis, two or three times a day.
So this is mostly aimed at US households who are used to a Lipton teabag in hot water in a mug. This will be a big change in flavor for those of you.
1.Boil the water.
First, bring water to a boil, but do not let it keep boiling. Remove it as soon as it comes to a boil. This is critical. This is important.
As soon as the tea comes to a boil, remove it from the stove.
Hot water will not do.
We want the tea leaves to infuse the flavor of the tea into the water, and tepid or hot water will not do this nearly as well as boiling water. I use an electric kettle because we use it all the time.
You will also need a good teapot, preferably one made in the UK (they know their tea there).
2.Warm the teapot for the perfect cup of tea.
So, when the kettle is almost boiling, put some water in the pot, just to warm up the teapot. Return the kettle to its base (or stovetop) to make it come to a full boil. Swirl the hot water around the teapot and then drain it out. Make sure to have your teabags ready.
A proper teapot.
3.Add the teabags and water to the pot.
When the water just comes to a boil, put the teabags in the teapot and immediately pour the water into the pot.
You do not place them in the cup.
You place the teabags in the kettle. That is it’s purpose.
4.Use a tea cosy (if you have one).
Next, if you have a tea cosy, cover the pot. If not, use a heavy tea towel or something to keep the pot warm. You’ll discover that this also makes a big difference in the outcome of the flavor of the tea.
A tea cosy.
5.Steep the tea.
Let the tea steep for about 3 to 5 minutes; the longer you leave it, the stronger it will be. (Three minutes in a tea pot is pretty weak.)
6.Pour the tea and add the milk (and sugar, if desired).
Now it’s time to pour the perfectly steeped tea.
If you’re going to add sugar, add it before the milk so that it has a chance to start melting before adding the cold milk. Regarding the whole “milk, or tea first” debate, it used to be that milk went in first to protect the china from cracking, so that’s no longer a reason.
I think it’s a personal preference. I like to add the milk after so I can better control the ratio of milk to tea, and you may think I’m crazy, but I say it tastes better, too. I also prefer whole milk. 2% milk is passable, but don’t offer me 1% or even talk to me about skim milk. Although you should NEVER add cream to a cup of tea, the natural cream that’s in whole milk adds a lot to the flavor of a proper cup of tea.
Now enjoy with a crumpet or a biscuit.
British (or Hong Kong) style crumpet. Toasted with well-salted butter.
Now…
With a cup of tea in one hand, and a fine hot buttered crumpet nearby. Let’s adjust our monocle to look at the editorial sections of the paper. Shall we?
Ah. A fine Rugby match. It’s all Crickets, don’t you know.
Oh, here’s something from the colonies…
It seems that President Biden is trying to incentivize Russia to stop dealing with China. It’s what he has been doing with the G7 folk in Europe. But, you know, Russia is “not biting”.
MOSCOW (Xinhua): Russian President Vladimir Putin has denounced actions aimed at driving a wedge between Moscow and Beijing, stressing that China is a strategic partner, not a threat.
"We can see attempts to destroy the relationship between Russia and China. We can see that those attempts are being made in practical policies,"
Putin said in an interview with US television network NBC published on Monday (June 14).
"We are pleased with the unprecedentedly high level of our relationship as it has evolved over the last few decades. We cherish it just like our Chinese friends do, which we can see,"
He said.
Putin praised…
"a high level of trust and cooperation in all areas"
…between the two countries, from politics and economy to technology and military.
"We do not believe that China is a threat to us. China is a friendly nation. It has not declared us an enemy as the United States has done,"
He said.
A huge and powerful country, China has been developing with its great economy and a tremendous volume of foreign trade,
He added.
"We have been working and will continue to work with China, which applies to all kinds of programs, including exploring deep space,"
The Russian leader concluded.
Meanwhile, exactly what’s up with the Western G7 nations?
Popular WhatsApp forwarded message:
I never saw this until now. But that’s probably because I don’t have WhatsApp. I don’t want it, and there’s a bunch of chicks that want to hook up with me because they see my LinkedIN account and mistakenly believe that I have lots of money that they can somehow extract via their sultry means…
LOL.
Anyways I got this jammed in my proton mail account from a reliable source, and it makes for a great read. I enjoyed it. Maybe you will too.
*A Lesson In History…*
1. Which countries invaded and occupied Indonesia?
*Netherlands for 350 years and Japan for 3.5 years*.
2. Which country was once the colony master of Malaya & India?
*Britain*.
3. Which countries invaded and occupied Vietnam?
*France 1857-1940 & 1946-1954, Japan 1940-1945 and USA (in Southern Vietnam) 1955-1975*.
4. Which countries were responsible for colonization of the African continent?
*Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Italy*.
5. Which 8 countries were responsible for the occupation of China in early 20th century?
*Britain, US, Germany, France, Russia, Japan, Italy & Austria-Hungary*.
6. Which countries are responsible for colonizing and almost annihilating the Red Indians in northern America?
*France & Britain*.
7. Which country colonized and almost annihilated Aborigines in Australia and New Zealand?
*Britain* .
8. Which are the member countries of G7?
*United Kingdom/Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan & USA*.
And now the million dollar question…
9. Why are the G7 members see China as a threat even though China is the only major nation on earth that has never invaded or occupied another country?
*Ego or fear of retribution* ?
America today is so many ways from being Right, that it’s easy to pick it’s imperfections. Here’s another article by a Pentagon worker who is alarmed at what is going on inside of the Washington DC beltway for war (with either or Russia and / or China)…
Horrified by the actual discussions going on inside of the Pentagon today.
Merriam Webster dictionary defines the word "othering" as an act wherein a race or culture is made to appear as "a large, uniform mass, rather than a diverse group of individuals… treating people from another group as less human than one's own group."
Historically, "othering" has served as a conditioning mechanism to dehumanize US adversaries, preparing normally empathetic men and women to act with less discrimination and greater brutality in war.
During WWII, US othering of the Japanese involved weaponizing disinformation and propagating racist stereotypes. It was considered as effective at setting the necessary psychological conditions for the controversial internment of Japanese Americans, firebombing of Tokyo, and dropping of atomic bombs on Japanese cities merely to deter the Soviet Union. Conceivably, left unmodified, a soldier's empathy for non-combatant human beings otherwise could have placed those ruthless American operations and their objectives at risk.
Othering of the Chinese people is evident in recent US news media in the form of a mix of unverified rumors, disinformation, and selective exclusion of contradictory facts. It has been reported that China-averse special interests have even paid US journalists to publish stories biased against China's policies, to include encouraging a US-China confrontation. Meanwhile, the island of Taiwan's secession champions in the US Congress have nurtured the absurd public perception that the US-emulating people aboard the island of Taiwan are "non-Chinese" in ethnic identity.
The apparent sophistication and coordination of Chinese othering are indications that some in the US are working to desensitize Americans to the certain horrors of a war with China over Taiwan. Its effects are already being witnessed in American society. Despite a presidential-level denouncement, racially motivated assaults on Chinese and Asians generally are sharply increasing. The dehumanization of our future foe is in full swing to the delight of China-averse special interests.
Some argue that a US war with China over Taiwan would be a just war, claiming the "non-Chinese" island citizenry deserves our protection, not just ideological support. Others will go further and assert that the US nuclear umbrella needs to be extended to encompass the island. They try to make the desperate case that the island of Taiwan is the last bastion of American values in Southeast Asia, and the final barricade that contains China.
The nuclear weapons theme deserves a closer look. Senior US military leaders at different times in the 20th century glibly suggested the employment of nuclear weapons to regain initiative in conventional conflicts with non-nuclear Asian nations. In addition to the island of Taiwan, these included conflicts in and with Vietnam, Korea, and China. Similarly, the employment of firebombing and nuclear weapons against a densely populated Japan was rationalized without significant opposition.
This was not so in the European theater. The firebombings of Dresden, Hamburg and elsewhere were emotionally contested even at the time of their planning, although the fanaticism and atrocious behavior of Imperial Japan was on a par with that of Nazi Germany. In fact, Winston Churchill went so far as to write: the destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. Tokyo, Nagasaki and Hiroshima did not benefit from such a distinguished Western advocate, and evidently neither does China.
Today hawkish members of Congress, most of whom have not served their country in uniform, casually resurrect such options as it pertains to supporting the island of Taiwan's split from China. It is easy for them to talk tough on the matter as most don't know the sacrifices of Service, and perhaps because of lacking ethnic identification with Chinese and other Asian races and cultures. This thoughtless devaluation of Asian casualties to mere nuclear attrition statistics results from the same sort of American othering seen in the 20th century.
In a war, the small island of Taiwan would erupt into a battleground with an intensity unknown since the world wars. All parties have known that the island's citizenry would be devastated far beyond the value of attempting to secede from China. Since this is known by the US Congress in advance, it illuminates the reality that the Chinese aboard the island of Taiwan are expendable. The issue of the island province is not and never was about protecting its people. Instead, it is all about the US striving to maintain its hegemonic reach during a period of decline in global influence.
This difference in the US perspectives on Asian and European lives is nothing new to any overseas or indigenous Asian citizen. To contort the present American devaluation and othering into a dubious justification for violating China's internal affairs and sovereignty is futile and transparent. It also portends that a fight over the island of Taiwan will rapidly devolve into a primitive, brutal, unrestricted war that has every appearance of, and is at its core an imperial US expedition.
As an American, my priority is US national interest. Attempting to support the renegade island of Taiwan's secession is directly contrary to the US national interest as we know in advance we will lose. Even in defeat many politicians, conservative ideologues, financially incentivized journalists, and special interests such as the US defense industry would benefit, just as a similar cabal did after Vietnam. But Taiwan secession is a transparently shallow cause with no path to victory. In fact, historical precedent shows that the US will lose primarily because the American public will see through the fraudulent deadly farce, but only after the unspeakable tragedy unfolds.
In the end, China' Province of Taiwan will always mean more to the physically proximate, ethnically identical, and nationalistically fueled China of over 1.4 billion, than it will to the distant, over-extended, and above all falsely incentivized US of 350 million. The heaviest burden of the tragedy of war will fall on the young, patriotic men and women who volunteered to serve in the US military in the faith that an assigned cause is legitimate and worthy of their sacrifice. Unfortunately, a war between the US and China over the island of Taiwan would be a complete betrayal of their good faith.
The author is a retired Marine Corps infantry officer who now serves as a US civil servant in the Pentagon. Opinions are of the author and do not represent the US government obviously.
So when a Pentagon insider is seeing things starting to turn in one direction and is willing to risk his life and his career over it, maybe we all should shit up and take notice.
This all makes me hungry because it reminds me of Po-Boy sandwiches
Well it does.
You see, this near religious fervor towards war reminds me of the “Bible thumping” ministers of the deep, deep American South. Like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. As much as I love Louisiana, and I do love it in so many, many ways, the “Bible Thumpers” are just plain obnoxious.
They really are.
Louisiana and Mississippi are just beautiful, and I consider my days in Hattiesburgh and Pervis to be very special ones.
This picture reminds me of my home in Hattiesburgh Mississippi. This is sort of what the front yard looked like. I can tell you that my cats just loved the place. Behind my house was a wooded bog / swamp and they would spend all the time exploring it and doing cat things.
Anyways…
This reminds me of Louisiana because of the assholes pushing for war. They are of the same type; a belief that they have been issued by GOD to be the “cleansers of the world” to remove all impurities that does not embrace the righteous nature of “democracy’!
Now getting to my point.
They remind me of food.
Why?
I do not know.
Girls remind me of food too. But I know why. I always picture myself eating with them and chatting with them, and telling stories, and drinking wine over delicious food. So it’s really understandable that I would associate women with food.
But sicko egomaniacs?
Let me continue….
…and try to explain. First, let’s discuss what a “Po’boy” is…
A Po-Boy is a traditional sandwich from Louisiana. It almost always consists of meat, which is usually roast beef or fried seafood, often shrimp, crawfish, fish, oysters or crab. The meat is served on New Orleans French bread, known for its crisp crust and fluffy center.
Fried catfish po’boy sandwich.
When I read about how America is going to “save the Taiwanese” for “democracy” and “freedom” I am reminded of the Southern Baptist minister in the deep South of Louisiana. The local folk were all pretty darn decent, and I served some time with them in prison, but the local government was so very corrupt, and the Baptist Ministers were the worst kind of “fire and brimstone” evangelicals.
You know like Tom Cotton is. Yeah, I know he’s from Arkansas. But it’s not that far away from Louisiana. Maybe one or two inches.
One inch.
Tom Cotton.
What a fella.
He’s (you know) one of the jack-asses pushing for World War III.
I associate him with his environment. As we should all associate people so that we can best understand them, their motivations, and why they do the crazy things that they do.
So it makes me think of what it was like, and how can I omit the wonderful Po’boy sandwiches and fine CajunCooking?
Cajun Cooking. Um um good em’ yah. You betya.
Well…
There are no easy answers.
Corrupt people in America push to become leaders and live in the enclave of the psychopaths; Washington DC. And he is one of them.
Personally, I cannot imagine him eating delicious food.
Instead, I picture him (somehow) eating food like this…
Here’s a pretty decent article by another ex-military working inside the Pentagon who is, justifiably horrified at all the talk about war, war, war! He wrote this and subsequently had his secret clearances revoked. He was then fired.
It would seem to some that a US war with China over the island of Taiwan appears imminent.
Considering the congestion of hostile forces in, above, and below the Taiwan Straits and South China Sea, conflict could explode by accident or design. Once blood is drawn, the US will have few options. If the US elects to fight China over the island of Taiwan, then it will lose.
Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) independence hubris is fueled by US cabinet-level China hawks and Congress' bipartisan, bicameral Taiwan Caucus. The DPP has rejected political reunification in one China and dismissed the "one country, two systems" model under which both Taiwan and Hong Kong have gotten rich. Encouraged by US trivialization of the three joint communiqués, the DPP parades a sense of entitlement, taking for granted an umbrella of protection with full knowledge of the dire consequences for the US
The Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) may not have been intended to give birth to Taiwan's renegade secessionists, but it has done exactly that.
The DPP's champions in the US Congress dismiss omens of fanatical China grit on the topic of Taiwan. China-bashing and Taiwan-coveting rhetoric forms an echo chamber reminiscent of the groupthink-led American Friends of Vietnam (AFV) lobby that pressured the US to commit to the Vietnam War killing 60,000 American patriots before the US disgracefully abandoned its ally.
But the Chinese are different.
China's history of the whole-of-society commitment to core national security priorities is legendary. The rebellions and unrests in the 19th century cost millions of Chinese lives. Twentieth century Chinese civil war losses ranged between 5 and 8 million, and 360,000 Chinese died in Korea, while routing and humiliating US and UN forces. In each case, the dynasties emerged stronger.
The US Congress' interests in Taiwan are deeply conflicted, better said corrupt.
The reciprocal relationship between defense lobbyists, industry contributions, and a Caucus Member's reelectability is well documented. The bipartisan support for increasing arms sales to Taiwan and even larger defense expenditures on the US Indo-Pacific Command are logical and transparent as all parties profit from the tension and war.
Many Americans assume China's citizenry longs for a liberal democracy like that on the island of Taiwan, and that war will trigger popular revolt.
But the Taiwan question is not an ideological dispute.
Rather it is a raw and painful open wound in China's civilizational identity. Today, US othering of Chinese only fuels a fierce nationalism in its 1.4 billion citizens. China has a traditional self-narrative wherein the preservation of face and enforcement of sovereignty are inseparable.
All the while the balance of power has shifted fundamentally. The US would be wise to regard China as a peer superpower, if only due to her casualty-tolerance - China's decisive advantage in any fight with the US. China also shares a binding mutual defense treaty with North Korea, and the depths of its friendship and security bonds with Russia should never be underestimated.
The US can think whatever it wants about China's ideology, culture, Xinjiang and Hong Kong policies, and sovereign claims to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and surrounding seas. But, whether the US likes it or not, those are ultimately China's internal affairs.
As for DPP claims of the Province of Taiwan's non-Chinese identity, they are historical fiction.
Fate made them Chinese just as fate made us Americans. We also know that the free will choice to carve out a territory and people from an existing nation incurs a steep price, one the Confederacy paid not long ago.
The US has never paid an existential price for violating another nation's sovereignty, leading to our smug sense of military invincibility.
However, with Taiwan being a core Chinese priority, that would be a fatal miscalculation.
Still, the US counts on regional allies to share the pain. Yet some will have blood debts to pay if they engage in China's civil war. For example, India was bloodied badly in the 1960s for testing China's territorial resolve. Japan's humiliating 50-year occupation of Taiwan and the Rape of Nanjing also remain fresh, unforgettable wounds for China. The US allies will definitely think twice before militarily intervening in China's unresolved civil war and internal affairs.
The US could advise Taiwan's secessionists to peaceably accept "one country, two systems" and cease its "independence" ambitions. If they don't stop their rhetoric, the US president could rescind the TRA, as baiting China to force reunification is of the DPP's own choosing. If Congress obstructs TRA recension, the US president could order all national security agencies to stand down in cross-Straits conflicts, keeping our powder dry for actual existential threats in the future.
In the end, the prosperous Taiwan people will make every effort to wag the American dog. But Taiwan's fate poses no existential threat to the US, and the US should not fall into the trap of paying for their hubris with American blood. However, in view of the violent political polarization of the US at home, an ill-advised foreign war with no path to victory would only serve to accelerate America's decline.
But he’s right. Don’t you know.
But the United States is absolutely out-of-control right now and no one wants to hear that “the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes”.
About as important as any band playing Jazz Fest is a bowl of Crawfish Monica, best enjoyed while festin’. Creamy, rich pasta (usually corkscrew rotini) is blended with lump crawfish meat and plenty of butter, heavy cream and spices. It’s kind of like mac and cheese took a wrong turn and ended up in Cajun country. The creators of Crawfish Monica, the folks at Kajun Kettle Foods, have crazy lines each year at Jazz Fest, and unfortunately they aren’t restaurateurs, so they don’t have a location you can visit. Could there be a better excuse to book your Jazz Fest tickets today?
The story “the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes”
Is everyone, or anyone, aware of this children’s story written by Hans Christian Anderson. You know the one. It was first published in April of 1873?
Well, then, here is a short summary.
The story is about a vain emperor whose favorite thing was buying and wearing the latest style of clothes. The story points out how the emperor cared nothing about reviewing his troops, going to the theater or going for carriage rides (Unless the rides were to show off his newest clothes). “He had a different coat for every hour of the day,” the story continues. When the emperor was late for a meeting or other event the excuse was usually, “The emperor is in his dressing room.”
The kingdom is described as a festive place with many visitors.
The story continues that on one day two “swindlers” came to the emperor’s town. The swindlers claimed to be weavers and bragged to anyone who would listen how they, “Could weave the most magnificent of clothes.” The swindler’s story continued that, “Not only were the colors uncommonly fine, but clothes made of this cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office, or who was unusually stupid.”
Word of the “weavers” reached the emperor and he thought this was great, he felt it would be the ideal product for him so he could determine who was not worthy of their position!
“He paid a large sum of money to the swindlers to start at once.” “They set up two looms and pretended to weave, though there was nothing on the looms. All the finest silk and purest old thread which they demanded went into their travel bags, while they worked the empty looms well into the night.”
The emperor was anxious to check on the progress and, while he was a very confident person, he was concerned that he might not see the material and asked a trusted old minister to check on the progress.
The swindlers, pretending to be weaving the material, greeted the minister when he arrived and said, “Don’t hesitate a moment to tell us what you think.” The minister was embarrassed and did not want anyone to suspect he was not worthy of his post, or stupid. “It’s beautiful.” was his reply.
The swindlers thanked him and then recited a list of all the colors and explained the intricacies of the weave. The minister listened intently as he feared everyone else would see the clothes. The swindlers then asked the emperor for more money, silk and thread.
The Emperor asked another trusted advisor to check on the progress. That advisor looked at the empty looms and said to himself, “Well I know that I am not stupid, so I must be unfit for my position. I can’t let anyone know.” He reported that the material was coming along splendidly.
When the emperor then viewed his new clothes, with all of his noblemen present, the swindlers pretended to hold up the finished product. The emperor did not see anything, but pretended he did because all of the noblemen said they saw it, and he did not want them to think that he was not fit for his position. The noblemen suggested the emperor wear his new clothes to the procession later that day. All in attendance agreed, afraid to be the only one to admit they could not see the clothes.
The swindlers then “dressed” the emperor in his new outfit and the entourage went off to the procession.
At the procession the townspeople, all aware of the special quality of the material, pretended the emperor was dressed magnificently until a child said, “He has no clothes!” The crowd started to repeat what had been said and finally cried out as one, “He has no clothes on.”
The story ends saying, “The emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, ‘This procession has to go on.’ So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.”
Another French word picked up by the Cajuns, étouffée means “smothered,” and it’s the smothering technique that gives this stewlike dish its thick, near-gravy texture. For locals, etouffee is one of those dishes where there’s no definitive recipe. Some folks make it with a dark roux, and others with a lighter roux; some use tomato, and others don’t. Sometimes crawfish is used, and sometimes shrimp is: It all depends on what’s in season. Bon Ton Cafe in New Orleans serves a solid plate of both crawfish and shrimp etouffee, to suit both tastes.
That’s America today
And isn’t it though?
It’s pretty bat-shit crazy. Like the UK is.
When I was growing up as a boy, we had this magazine called “MAD Magazine” that we all used to read. We would read it cover to cover. It was filled with just off-the-wall interpretations of life, and we all loved it.
Today, it seems, America is just one big old MAD Magazine.
I'm sure everyone remembers their first issue of Mad Magazine. It was odd, uproariously funny, and immature enough for everyone. My first issue was when I was about twelves, when my mom bought me an issue to read at the orthopedic surgeon's office (I had broken my arm about a week prior). However, I'm no kid anymore (or so the judge tells me). I'm a college student, looking to become a professional teacher, and I'm a respected reviewer for this website. How can I like something as immature as Mad?
Simply put, Mad is the most dead-on entertainment magazine available. Through a combination of peurile humor, self-deprication, excellent art, and witty writing, Mad has seperated itself from the pack of low-end satire mags (like Cracked) and made itself a true piece of American culture. Stop groaning out there.
First, Mad brings itself to attention primarily for its spoofs of popular movies and television shows. I think this results in the "Weird Al" syndrome - you pay more attention to the obvious mockeries than the subtle ones. As time has gone on, Mad's style has cleaned up considerably - which means that now, you can catch marginal jokes even better than before, and the magazine fits more in. While occasionally lewd, Mad also recognizes that sometimes, humor is best left suggested, and many jokes are subtle innuendos, much beyond what people would initially give the mag credit for.
Mad's jokes work so well because they first did what Mystery Science Theater 3000 became famous for - finding what everyone makes fun of about in a given piece of entertainment and finding the perfect gag to make about it. For a classic example, in their parody of "Big Daddy," "Big Bladder," they have someone go up to the kid and complain about his wooden delivery. Who would be such an expert on bad childhood acting? The block of wood that played Anakin in "Phantom Menace."
I couldn't have come up with a better gag myself, and generally, Mad gives this kind of performance consistently. While it does occasionally foul up - I found some of their Pokemon parodies lacking the punch of other shots - Mad creates gags much better than, say, your average night of NBC's "Must See TV."
However, Mad also has a rabid following because of their regular gags that appear often. Of course, despite the passing of its creator, "Spy vs. Spy" is going on as strong as ever, with a new airbrushed style that doesn't detract from "the famous duo of double-cross and deceit." Dave Berg still puts in regular duty with his clever "The Lighter Side Of..." which has modern lampoonings of everyday situations. Newer additions to this mix are sure to become classics - "Jenkins and Melvin," an answer to Highlight's "Goofus and Gallant," brings me to tears laughing every time. While Jenkins is even more of a proper gentleman than Gallant, Melvin is sure to provide a situation even more ridiculous than Goofus ever could. Almost frighteningly educational.
However, nothing showcases Mad's continued tradition of excellence like one new feature and one classic. Al Jaffee is still around, and he still makes a new, highly entertaining "Mad Fold-In" for the back cover of every issue. There is sure to be an off-beat answer to the fold-in, and the art is rather cleverly done - I still wish I knew how Jaffee does it. On the opposite page from the fold-in is a new regular feature which has quickly become a favorite of mine - the Celebrity Odds of Death listing. When I first saw it, it listed the various odds of the Spice Girls dying in various ways - "Terminal Giggling" had a 1:1 chance, while "Choking on a chicken bone during a dinner celebrating their 5th year in the music business" had over a billion to one shot. I enjoy this feature so much, I start with it first whenever I pick up a new issue.
One thing about Mad, though, is that the humor is aimed for all levels - I wonder if the writers had a steady diet of "Rocky and Bullwinkle" when they were younger.
While there are plenty of obvious jokes for all ages, there is plenty of subtle humor, especially political humor, in each issue. Looking back on older issues I have, I'm surprised at how many jokes I didn't get because I didn't know much about politics then. If Mad felt like trying a bit harder, they could probably make a sister magazine that concentrated on politics. Of course, that would just scare people afraid of the magazine multiplying.
Mad isn't totally perfect. There are still occasional rough spots in the art, and sometimes, a whole section will just lack laughs, such as the first parody of Pokemon that Mad put together. Also, a new feature, "Monroe," usually lacks the punch and humor of the other segments - you can generally skip it. Also, Mad sometimes skimps over parts you wish were mocked, due to the limited amount of space the magazine has. I sometimes wish the magazine would expand and maybe carry a few ads (from Archie McPhee and other such companies) to pack in more sufficiently wickedly barbed jokes.
But in all honesty, this doesn't detract from the magazine as a whole. It consistently gives you more laughs than anything since Monty Python. Moreover, unlike most topical humor, it ages like wine, getting better with the passing years. And with the new humorous monthly features, the magazine is insuring that it will have a healthy continued existence. From 61 Man Squamish to Superduperman, from Spy vs. Spy to the Fold-In, Mad has helped define itself as a prominent piece of our culture. Find out why - while America may be going somewhere in a handbasket, Mad is here to save our sanity.
-MAGSConnect
I like that. “…while America may be going somewhere in a handbasket, Mad is here to save our sanity.”
But is America really going bat-shit crazy? Does it really resemble the movie “Idiocracity”?
A well-informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny,” noted Thomas Jefferson. It follows from this that if you want to visit tyranny upon a people, you can start by dumbing them down.
Ergo, 21st-century America.
So laments commentator Andrea Widburg. Writing Monday in a piece titled “There is no bottom to the ignorance of supposedly educated Americans,” she reminds us that the American system, “going all the way back to the Founding Fathers,” was predicated on having an educated population. “People weren’t expected to be scholars,” she pointed out, but the Founders did emphasize that their government couldn’t work without “a literate and moral population.”
“And that is what they got: most Americans were literate before public schooling,” Widburg continued. “Colonial Americans could also read at a very sophisticated level. The colonists would not have known what to make of the abysmally educated people this scary, funny video shows.”
They wouldn’t have known what to make of much that’s going on today. But the video in question, posted Sunday on YouTube, and showing supposedly average Americans trying to answer simple questions, and failing, is striking.
The question: “Who was the first person to land on the sun?” was taken seriously by the interviewees shown. Another highlight (lowlight) was when the questioner asked, “What country is Venice, Italy, located in?” The young woman queried responded, “Gosh, I’m gonna’ be a teacher, so I should know this.”
You can just see what is going on in the USA by the opinions of Americans on the outside looking in. Here's an article written by a Washington DC insider back on 2019 right before Coronavirus hit, and Donald Trump was getting ready for reelection...
One commenter under the video remarked “This can’t be legit” or “we are doomed.” But not only does it seem authentic, it simply reflects a multitude of “man on the street” interviews conducted over the years by comedian Jay Leno, shock jock Howard Stern, and others.
Knowing this, it’s not surprising to me that the referenced young woman would be a prospective teacher. It’s not just that studies have shown how little many educators know; it’s also that the people educating the educators — the pseudo-elites — are in their own way no better.
Shocked by her experiences at “prestigious” Columbia University, North Korean defector Yeonmi Park recently remarked about the state of America that even “North Korea is not this nuts.” Park was referring to the anti-Western sentiment and intense political correctness prevalent today, and she wasn’t joking.
Yet while our “wokeness” is called many things, nuts and dangerous among them, it’s also something else: profoundly stupid.
It can be said without exaggeration that America has become “Idiocracy.” This term is the title of a 2006 film portraying a dystopian, future United States in which IQs have dropped precipitously. People are obsessed with sex (sound familiar?), the president is a former professional wrestler and porn star who still dresses as befitting his former vocation (the one requiring clothes), vulgarity is everywhere, and entertainment has become über-simplistic and crude.
Of course, IQs are still high enough in the United States today, though some studies do show that they’ve been dropping for decades now. But the real issue is a moral corruption which infects everything else.
While real threats (e.g., China, the aforementioned moral crisis) are largely ignored, our pseudo-elites concern themselves with stupid things. Wholly contrary to science/evidence, they claim a boy can be a girl by willing it, we should be concerned about new “pronouns,” “diversity” is a strength, children should be vaccinated against a disease that doesn’t imperil them, a nation that has allowed 85 to 90 percent of its post-1967 immigrants to be from the Third World is “white supremacist,” and more.
It’s no wonder, either, that pseudo-elites want to “cancel” people who dispute the above. Their assertions are literally too stupid to be debated successfully; all they can do is make sure the debates never happen.
Then consider whom we now elevate to prominence. Curricula nationwide have been influenced by the 1619 Project, a deceit-filled, propagandistic portrayal of American history created by one Nikole Hannah-Jones. With red-dyed hair, Jones wouldn’t be out of place in Idiocracy, and she’s not out of place in ours: She was given a professorship by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Also fitting in is New York City-based psychoanalyst Dr. Donald Moss, who penned a recent paper in which he called “whiteness” a “malignant, parasitic like condition” that lacks a “permanent cure.”
His work was published in a medical journal.
And Jones and Moss are just two of a multitude of idiocrats.
The skids for their nonsensical thinking have long been well greased with philoso-babble. Years ago, the idiocrats labeled logic “white, male, and linear,” as if it’s a cultural oddity. Then there’s Critical Race Theory, whose proponents have claimed that “rugged individualism,” “a can-do attitude,” “hard work,” and “striving towards success” reflect “white male culture” and that planning for the future and punctuality are “white norms.”
The idiocrats have also bemoaned the teaching of “facts” — even though facts, as little snippets of Truth, are how we piece together life’s jigsaw puzzle. But it’s no surprise pseudo-elites deemphasize facts: They want to replace them with fiction.
They’ve succeeded, too, which is why “the most recent generations of school graduates will bore you to tears talking about gender, racism, class victimization, America’s wrongdoing over the centuries, etc.,” writes Widburg. As Ronald Reagan put it, they “know so much that isn’t so.”
The solution to this, of course and as I’m wont to emphasize, is a return to virtue (objectively good moral habits). Virtue neutralizes moral corruption. In this regard, one entity doing good work, and helping to mold children’s minds properly, is the Freedom Project Academy, a fully accredited, online school offering classical education to students in kindergarten through high school.
But lacking this, it’s unsurprising that a senile man was elevated to the presidency. Joe Biden is the perfect leader and metaphor for a nation that’s forgotten its history, its virtue, its faith, and its reason for being.
OK. So America is senile.
But when did this all happen? Last year? What was going on and what turned America to the shit-storm that it is today?
“At first we thought they were just another snake cult, but now their towers are everywhere.” —Conan the Barbarian 1982
At the dawn of my congressional career, after some of us staffers endured a particularly egregious dose of idiocy, one of my colleagues was moved to compare our office to Saint Elizabeth’s, then still functioning as a mental hospital in DC (and now, fittingly, as headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security). “Not quite,” I responded. “Here the lunatics are in charge.”
That exchange, alas, has become a prophecy for the nation at large. It begins, as we are made aware by each daily tweet-storm, at the very top, but this insanity could not persist without broad and intense public support. It has become commonplace to characterize such supporters as haters, but while it would be dangerous to underestimate the role of sheer malice, Trumpism could only sustain itself with tens of millions of people who might not fit the profile of a hater, but are assuredly either borderline imbeciles or not-quite-certifiably insane. Examples there are in profusion; but rather than ringing the changes on every single winner of the Darwin Awards, let us examine three cases that have wider policy implications.
Item. Measles, an infectious disease that each year once killed several hundred people and caused about a thousand cases of encephalitis in America, was declared eradicated in the United States in 2000. But thanks to a kind of misbegotten Hitler-Stalin alliance between right-wing religious nuts and New Age-Hollywood Hills types, the disease has come roaring back.
What other topic could unite such a disparate gaggle of characters as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., trading on his father’s martyr credibility to whisk us back to pre-Enlightenment times, and Texas Republican State Rep. Jonathan Stickland, (apparently such an extreme Neanderthal that even Texas’ own hardline Freedom Caucus was too liberal for him) who has called vaccinations “sorcery?”
Mimicking the measles that their evangelism spreads, American anti-vaxxers are also some of the most industrious Internet pests known to science, even if their trolling is supplemented by bots from a certain foreign country.
Item. One of the “noble lies” undergirding modern society is the myth of the rational actor. So-called enlightened self-interest suffuses economics (although corporations know better, which explains their lavish expenditures on advertising); as well as game theory, which supposedly prevents nuclear war from breaking out; and politics.
Political scientists (and some psychologists) are fond of proving that people “vote their interests” by the simple, circular expedient of defining a subject’s true interests as whatever they opt for. It is time for a sweeping reevaluation of this canard.
In 2016, American farmers voted by a margin of between 3 and 4 to 1 in favor of Donald Trump over the Democrat. This happened in spite of the fact that he told them in clear and unmistakable terms that he would, if elected, ignite a trade war with their most lucrative export market. Further, he would cut off their supply of the low cost, often undocumented labor needed for fruit and vegetable picking as well as beef, pork, and poultry processing.
As a result, farm income is down, even though the income calculation includes the Market Facilitation Program, money extorted from the rest of us to reward Trump’s political base. Farm bankruptcies have soared. There is alleged evidence (not quantified by polling) that “farmers are losing their patience” amid mealy-mouthed equivocating from farm belt, GOP-elected officials over Trump’s latest tariff threats.
For now, though, it appears that farmers are sticking with Trump. If his electoral margin among them should even fall to 2½ to 1 in 2020, Democrats will think of it as a miraculous breakthrough. The bulk of farmers would likely prefer to go down in whatever fate decides will be America’s functional equivalent of the rubble of Berlin.
Item. For decades, American religious fundamentalists have ceaselessly worked to poison whole departments of knowledge – from geology to history to herpetology – with ignorance and disinformation. All of this in the service of a project to turn the country into a living tableau of The Handmaid’s Tale.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Apocalypse. They seem to have dropped Jesus altogether as the ostensible object of their adoration and instead became a cult of the Antichrist. Every single sin they claimed to revile—adultery, fornication, false witness, the Mephistophelean sin of overweening pride—is now embodied in their new god incarnate, Donald Trump.
Like Lucifer, he led them to the mountaintop and offered them the world if they would but bow down to him. And they obediently dropped like ninepins.
Ecclesiastical dervishes like Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham, and Robert Jeffress seem to be working out the theology to replace Jesus in the holy trinity with Donald Trump. And the faithful lap it all up like bulimics at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
* * *
How in the world did we get here? Journalist Kurt Andersen, writing in his abundantly detailed Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, believes craziness was baked into the American cake from the moment the Mayflower hove to at Plymouth Rock. Whether the holy man was Cotton Mather, P.T. Barnum, or Deepak Chopra, Americans have been primed to believe with the faith of a five-year-old in Santa Claus. That said, he posits that there were cycles of remission, when rationality was apparently on top, and then outbreaks of fever, when the passion burned with naked flame. The latter applies to an age like this.
My own pet theory is that American craziness, while always abundant, was relatively contained until 9/11, which opened a Pandora’s Box of hysterical fear, one of the basic ingredients of irrationality. It was quickly followed by the invasion of Iraq, which unloosed an avalanche of vaunting that we were endowed with special powers to remake the world. Note an essential component of stupidity: we retaliated for 9/11 by invading a country which had nothing to do with it.
On the heels of the mournful realization that remaking the Middle East wasn’t all it was cracked up to be came the financial crash of 2008, a folly of such greed and wishful thinking that it pushed a sizable portion of the public, already emotionally labile from the previous two shocks, right over the edge. Everything that followed, like the birther mania, was a signal flare that the Republican Party and its assorted hangers-on had devolved from merely being a pack of cynical crooks to full-dress nihilistic cultists.
All of this was supercharged by the Internet, right-wing talk radio, and Fox News – media nonexistent during previous bouts of mania. They acted as an electronic petri dish to purify and amplify the craziness.
We are now seeing the infection of lunacy on full display, like the alien monster in John Carpenter’s The Thing bursting out of its human hosts. Where exactly it will all end is anyone’s guess, but the odds are not good that it will end well.
Geopolitics
America is not a lone region full of “special” people like the American Nationalists want to believe. It is part of the mechanism that is humanity. And when the cog in the machine breaks, the machine stops working.
Geopolitics revolves around national economic might and during the historical era of Modernity economic might was always procured by capital and the products and services that it offers. These products and services generate the national income which allow a nation to spend on bettering its peoples’ lives and/or on military means to submit other nations or to defend from such submission.
One thing is clear. The West, over the last 200 years, has been selling the most advanced products and this gained it the largest national incomes.
But, you do know, that the West decided not to share the wealth with its citizens.
Instead, it decided to invest in military means to submit other nations.
Yah. And it worked.
The West was hegemonic for all this time.
America was the leader and the rest of the world bowed on bended knee to America. Most did not like it. Most did not care for it. Most actually despised it. But they were powerless to do anything about it.
But things have suddenly turned lately.
China is now at the core of the factory of the world. It is at the core of the East-Asian supply-chain. And no East-Asian country would dare detach itself from this chain because its national economy would immediately collapse.
I mean, at the exception of ideological bull-dogs like Australia’s Morrison, everyone recognizes the hard reality that dominates the Geopolitical scene of this 1st half of the 21th century.
Morrison and Trump; ideological brothers.
After it had lost the Yeltsin opportunity…
…of a near infinite supply of energy and resources…
…the West abruptly awoke to the shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world from its shores to East-Asia.
The Geo-Political world got enraged as Trump so well demonstrated for the whole world to see.
But the fact is that the American empire has lost its clothes :
American GDP
By all accounts America's GDP is largely inflated and the reality is that it could easily be half the size of what is announced officially (see hedonic adjustments)
Finance vs. Manufacturing
American production is no longer its core activity. Financial shenanigans are now what accounts for the bulk of its GDP.
Technology
Technologically the US has fallen from its pedestal and has now to reckon with the emergence of China as a technological leader. This explains why the US is now panicking and literally copying Chinese political economics while drafting new legislation ordering the state to invest 150 billion in the technological development of its national champions…
GDP Growth is an illusion
American GDP growth over the last 40 years was generated exclusively by the injection of new money in the form of new debts. During the last year US total debt increased by one third the size of GDP ! . This is not just unsustainable it is pushing the can down the road until a reckoning is imposed by the facts…
Destruction of the American workforce
The incomes of the 99% have been stagnating and even sinking for at least 50% of them and this explains the sheer social misery that litters the land of the free.
Balkanization
In the meantime the cohesion of the USA has been tanking and today US society is completely atomized as was so well demonstrated during its handling of Covid-19. Societal atomization means that the country is now unable to act as one unity. Each time it wants to undertake something the country shreds itself into multiple pieces going their own directions all at once. This is the best recipe to lose a war… the military knows that darn well and it wants to avoid that price !
So what we observe today is much noise and theater but very little really consequent actions.
But observers of the Geopolitical scene make a whole lot of this theater…
It will, without any doubt, take some time for the dust to settle but the outcome is now unavoidable for the following reasons :
1. Economic Shifts are in process. They cannot be stopped. By all accounts the shift of the economy world is irreversible and will further amplify going forward
2. The current global supply chain is fixed. The West does no longer have what it takes financially, nor societally, to set up an independent supply-chain. In other words it is forced to compose with East-Asia and more particularly with China.
3. China is gargantuan. By all accounts China’s economy is soon going to pass the size of the US economy in dollar terms and it will pass the combined West soon thereafter.
4. The world will continue without America. The internationalist wing, among Western big capital holders, wants to share in the profits generated by the Juggernaut China and by East-Asia. It is thus no longer going to sit passively when a Western political servant has a mental breakdown. Diplomacy will thus be forced to make a come-back soon.
In the meantime a last ditch propaganda effort is being made by the nationalist wing among big capital holders to try to cover China under a thick layer of dirt. But facts are necessarily going to emerge that will soon turn the tables on them.
5. China will grow to megalithic size and power. If it were not for “the Great Convergence of Late-Modernity” in the near future China’s economy should reach multiple times the size of the combined Western economies.
6. Convergences. The Great Convergence of Late-Modernity is the convergence of the following series of complex factors :
The multiple side-effects of Modernity are converging toward each other and starting to unleash all kinds of feed-back loops that are accelerating the die-off of life on earth. Many biologists, and complex-systems analysts, are warning that humanity’s activities are approaching a threshold after which the world natural systems will shift one after another outside of the bandwidth of life. Climate change is but one among this multitude of side-effects…
The present shift of the economy-world outside, of the realm of the Western civilization, is unleashing a mental breakdown on the West. And it will be extremely difficult for it to regain its composure and face the facts that are responsible for what is transforming into a real predicament for humanity.
The predicament of humanity is that to survive it has to abandon its present societal paradigm (the reason that is at work within capital) and adopt a new one (the reason that is at work within life).
. Grillades, pronounced “gree-ahds,” are little medallions of pounded-thin steak smothered in a tomato gravy. Typically served over a bed of grits, grillades are a popular brunch dish, but there are no rules saying you can’t eat them for dinner, too. Though Louisiana natives tend to make them at home, there’s a great version on the brunch menu at Café Adelaide in New Orleans.
Selections from Godfree Roberts’ extensive weekly newsletter: Here Comes China.
The expectation expressed by Russia and China is…
…that the US is no longer stable…
…and is becoming dysfunctional…
…and a bigger problem than what is worth to prop up.
A retreat, a crash, or a type of retrenchment from the world is imminent.
Russia and China. Top Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi and Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev co-chaired the 16th round of strategic security consultations. This is a high-level meeting focusing on strategic cooperation in confronting both regional and global security and geopolitical threats. Or, in other words, “what to do about America and it’s war-loving-neocons”.
Quote:
China and Russia held a new round of strategic security consultations on Tuesday in Moscow, and during the frequent interactions between the two major powers in recent months.
The world has showed a dangerous trend of disorder or tensions in some regions, including the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Western Pacific.
All, and everyone, due to global strategic shifts made by the US,
Quote:
So Beijing and Moscow must keep close coordination to handle the upcoming situation.
Including how to establish a new order.
This new order will replace the US-dominated one.
This will occur once the latter gets totally dysfunctional.
Quote:
Chinese analysts said that the recent change has been generally caused by the decline of US hegemony.
Not only will the US pressure and hostility push China and Russia to stand closer...
... but the decline in Washington’s strength and influence (in some regions)...
... will also make Beijing and Moscow consider how (to figure out new regional order) to stabilize the situation and protect their interests after the US pullout.
The similar remarks made by China and Russia toward the US is a clear signal to the world that the US hegemony will no longer be tolerated.
The world order dominated by the US and its allies is unable to keep stability in many regions.
This failure of American order is causing more tensions and conflicts.
Weapons and nukes
We understand at the Saker Blog, that Russia has the weapons complexes and the ability to defend itself even in this climate of withdrawal from the many weapons treaties.
We also know that the US tried to force China to attend Nuclear Proliferation or Reduction talks with the US, up to the point of staging a meeting to pretend that China did not turn up.
The world has accepted that China had not done a major weapons build-out up to now, and if they did, it was muted. For decades, China only maintained the smallest nuclear weapons array.
This may be changing in front of our eyes.
After both Trump and Biden running all sorts of openly hostile efforts full-spectrum against China, a wise China, would ramp up production of MAD (Mutually Assured destruction) armories to counter any American aggressive action.
My post published on Chinese social media: As the US is crazily implementing containment strategy toward China, China must intensify building its nuclear deterrence. Here is the translation. pic.twitter.com/shJHXUJ5FX
— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) May 28, 2021
Those that follow China and its news closely understand that if Hu Xijin says something like this, or writes a column such as this, the build-out of a Chinese nuclear deterrence is in full swing.
In the midst of these happenings, Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon papers leaked another top secret document. One that he had worked on, and kept secret for 50 years. Parts of it were obtainable but not the full document.
He drops a powerful warning of the present threat of nuclear war with Russia and China.
Here’s his thoughts…
Daniel Ellsberg: This Month We Must Discuss If We Should Go to Nuclear War Over Taiwan, Ukraine or Syria
The 1958 nuke China over Taiwan project was really quite amazing. The Pentagon wasn’t even ‘defending’ Taiwan, they wanted to do it over small islands held by the Chiang Kai-shek regime just 5 miles from mainland China. A classic bully move, ‘I have the right to punch you because you let your shadow touch me!’
——————————————————————————————————————
“Celebrated whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, … now age 90…
… used the occasion of the April 30-May 1 commemoration of the 50th anniversary of his release of the Pentagon Papers…
…in an event organized by the University of Massachusetts-Amherst…
… to reveal that John Foster Dulles had proposed in 1958 that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend to the President of the USA…
…that a nuclear exchange with China be launched in the Taiwan Straits.
Even though that would mean that Taiwan and its people would be wiped out completely.
The reason being for the sole geopolitical purpose of maintaining the United States “position” in the world.
I’m getting hungry
Right now I am drinking my favorite Shiraz wine from Australia and eating nuts, but still my stomach is a grumbling. I know that I can get some noodles, some rice, some dumplings, but really I am “hankering” (desiring) some delicious chicken. Whether it is BBQ or fully cooked.
You know, people in different areas cook chicken differently.
I grew up on Polish Hill in Pittsburgh that cooked the chicken in the oven with bacon on the top until the chicken was well done. A comparative cooking method in China is to cook it in mud, and the the chicken some out all moist and tender but well cooked. But here in the Southern section of China in the Guangzhou corridor, they like he chicken nearly raw with lots of exposed fat and grizzle. Not really to my liking.
I once had a Polish engineer visiting one of my factories and once he tasted the mud baked chicken, he devoured the entire bird. He sore that it reminded him of how his grandmother cooked chicken.
BBQ chicken.
Why have another world war?
“The 1958 Taiwan Straits Crisis, A Documented History,” Ellsberg quoted Dulles’s message to the meeting:
“Nothing seems worth a world war … until you looked at the effect of not standing up to its challenge.”
The RAND study explained that
“the issue then was, would we, as the joint chiefs, recommend the use of nuclear weapons to defend Quemoy, and Matsu, and Taiwan.
And possibly use seven- to ten-kiloton weapons with the expectation that … the Soviets would respond and would hit Taiwan.”
Why have a war?
Finally:
“Let them try to jail me for disclosing this still-top secret fact today,”
Ellsberg declared, adding that he was revealing the secret because,
“I have no doubt whatever, that that discussion is going on in the Pentagon right now…. This is the month we have to be discussing the issue, in public, of whether we should go to nuclear war over Taiwan, or Ukraine, or Syria.”
“Although the circumstances surrounding the U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan have changed dramatically since that stage of the Cold War, the 1958 Taiwan crisis provides a sobering lesson as the US military gears up for a new military confrontation with China.”
Of course the western and specifically the US provocative and unintelligent statements via their media containment complex continue. It is what Andrei Martyanov calls “a very acute case of a bipolar disorder .
When driving through Acadiana (aka Cajun country), you likely won’t be able to miss highway billboards advertising boudin at the next butcher shop or gas station — and you’d be foolish not to pull over. Handed to you still steamy, boudin is made from all those good, unctuous spare pork parts, which get mixed with rice and spices and stuffed into a casing. A local obsession, it’s best tried at Best Stop market in Scott, La. The casing can be thick and chewy, so you’re better off squeezing out the filling. While you’re at Best Stop, be sure to order a boudin ball — its fried-orb cousin — too.
Pentagon Special Forces nominee says US should ‘strongly consider’ training Taiwanese guerillas against ‘Chinese invasion’
Whether it is Taiwan, or Xinjiang or Hong Kong or any other area where propaganda can be manufactured, the US mighty Wurlitzer continues.
This is then the summary of the situation today:
Ellsberg warns that the same talks that happened 50 years ago to possibly strike China with nuclear weapons is no doubt happening in the Pentagon today.
Yang Jiechi and Nikolai Patrushev states that Russia and China must coordinate in order to establish a new order to replace the US-domination, once the latter gets totally dysfunctional.
China is mass producing hyper-velocity MIRV ICBM’s armed with massive warheads in a frantic pace.
Pentagon Insiders are horrified by the discussions and all warn that not only would America lose a war, but that could be destroyed and subjugated to an unfathomable degree.
Given the stature of Yang Jiechi and Nikolai Patrushev, I would consider the above some of the most significant moves in the world today. There are those who reason that as the US-dominated world order gets more dysfunctional, the urge for them to use nuclear weapons will become stronger. I will leave this here for you to make up your own mind and comment on what you see.
Moves around SARS–CoV-2 and its progeny Covid-19 and more leaks
There is also the major US accusation that Covid-19 was a lab leak and China is responsible. Yet China has no history of creating these kinds of bioweapons (if indeed it was created as such) but the US has a rich history of creating and using such weapons.
The acceleration of blaming China with respect to the virus is proportional to the financial and economic collapse of the west.
What west fails to understand is demonising China won't prevent its own collapse.
— The Sirius Report (@thesiriusreport) May 29, 2021
So why do we always say that Americans are effectively the most brainwashed people in the world?
Take a look at what happened to information similar to the Daniel Elsberg Pentagon Papers Leak…
…and his current leak of nuclear planning against China even to the point of demolishing and sacrificing Taiwan.
Godfree Roberts took a specific document and updated and annotated it for clarity. This is called The ISC (Needham) Report.
Published at the height of the Korean War, it validated claims by North Korea and China that the US had launched bacteriological warfare (biological warfare, BW) attacks against both troops and civilian targets in those two countries over a period of several months in 1952.
The cleaned up, updated and annotated version is available for Kindle on Amazon for a small amount here. , And a free copy (not very readable) is available here
If you wonder why the Americans have not seen this, or have not known about it, this will give you all the information…
The traditional Monday night meal of red (kidney) beans dates back to the 19th century, when the ladies of the house did laundry every Monday while the beans slow-cooked in a pot all day. It’s still a popular Monday night tradition, even if we stopped doing our laundry quite so regularly. The beans are served on a bed of rice and with the almost mandatory bottle of hot sauce. The best place to eat some is right at home, but the Creole Lunch House in Lafayette — open only for lunch — is also worth the trip.
Jeffrey Kaye says:
If you ask anyone in Cajun country, cochon de lait is French for “a pig still sucking on his mama.” (Outsiders know this creature as a suckling pig.) When cooked over a raging wood-fueled fire for hours, this pig becomes juicy, tender pulled pork. Many people have their first cochon de lait experience at Jazz Fest from Walker’s Southern Style BBQ, where the lines never die down. Thankfully, you can go to their smokehouse at any time of year for their Cochon de Lait Po’ Boy (and you should).
Secular vs. Traditional Values
An more than interesting visual for thoughts and reflection : the 2020 Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world by political scientists Ronald Inglehart (April, 2021) and Christian Welzel.
Some current geopolitical tensions can be seen through the distances on this map. One can imagine that this survey visual is significantly subject to change these days, through among others economic developments, political and media-psychological movements. Some triggered to find more distance towards corners while others moving towards centers and clusters.
My thought would be a map how much do different countries learn from each other in terms of values, followed by communication, society and governance. Might it not be that self-expression, traditional values have a harder time accepting other ways, even if it would be to the advantage of the actual practice and policy ??
It is noteworthy that today’s tensions are caused by differences in values, not by models such as capitalism or communism, not by economies.
Cross cultural awareness and mutual learnings with psycho-political projections/reflections is what counts for 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗚𝗘 towards a better and fairer future.
Everything is going crazy in America today
Consider the collapse of the remaining American companies. A this article clearly demonstrates.
The world is in flux. If that sounds like another virus, it certainly feels like it on some days. Most of us have been pivoting so fast to adjust we are simply falling over from dizziness. Are we still resilient if we refuse to get back on a twirling carousel? Sometimes it feels like we are moving too fast to even see the brass ring, let alone grab it. Rubbing a Buddha belly is a calmer alternative. No pivoting needed. A friendly little rub, smile and breathe…
Peace is not a commodity for politicians. Despite past and current events, it’s not an item up for sale. Media rushes us from one regurgitated opinion to the next, parading it as news. Things to “like” or “follow” directed by Google algorithms and data mining. Our worlds narrowed through complex AI that doesn’t yet understand the randomness of human thought. The internet that previously opened the world, has become a political and marketing tool making our personal worlds smaller and smaller. The informational windows to other worlds, ideas, and ways of living get lost in advert hit scores.
Believing “our” world is the whole world is a slippery slide into the mud of bigotry and intolerance. And, rudeness! I for one, am missing Miss Manners. Poor thing crashed off stage faster than she could run out with her walker. Slander and Libel grabbed their wigs running for the exit without waiting for Justice to keep up. Nobody was holding the door open for anyone.
Maybe being our “true and transparent” selves needs a few hard check stops. A different kind of “wokeness” that embraces the idea of getting along for the benefit of everyone in society. Why do manners matter in our changing world? Nobody cares if the fork is different for salad or meat, when you’re hungry, it’s just a damn fork getting food in your mouth.
Manners and civility need a comeback. For all our sakes. If someone holds the door open, it doesn’t matter whether the door-holder is a man or, woman. I don’t feel my ability to open a door is in question. It’s just a nice gesture. Manners are a code of actions for consideration, respect and, grace. An acknowledgment of another, human. It is the foundation for a functioning society, of being -humane.
Why is the American leadership so against people living their lives and being happy ? It seems like they have a mental disorder and re surrounded by sycophants who also share the same disorder.
No need to spout false positive “thank-you’s” or to pretend you like something you don’t. We can still be transparent and true to ourselves while respecting the space and ideas of others.
Corporate America, is having a hard time in the pandemic as workers are quitting their jobs in droves. Walking resolutely away from environments that are now recognized as “toxic”. Previously “normal” work environments that lacked basic respect for employees. This attitude caused historical business losses of over $250 billion dollars per year. Which begs the question, how much can companies afford to lose, before it hurts enough to change? Giants like Amazon and TJX have been churning people for years without regard for basic human dignity or, respect. Dudes have no manners.
25 states have officially cut the extra $300 of Federal unemployment aid. In a sad display of very bad manners and name-calling, they claim a mere $300 is stopping people from working. With a Federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, people can’t afford to work. Not only is this 100% below what is needed today for a living wage, but in addition, employees are treated like disposable trash as companies rake in billions of dollars in clear profit.
Yes, corporate America, backed by an embedded political system, is screaming. They are furious that the pandemic has shown them with their pants down. The “you can’t live without us” myth has been broken. The truth is, corporate America can’t work without employees. And, workers are now “woke” and demanding what they deserve. Respect, a living wage, and more importantly, as 3 in 5 refuse to return to the “office”, an environment that is not toxic. Where humanity is not just displayed as a pretty mission statement but transparently practiced with good manners.
My Mexican mocha coffee at Kaflex Roasters came with heart layered in. This small business survived the 2020 pandemic devastation. Why? Customers and employees agreed; it’s a pleasure to be here. It feels “real”. Kindness and respect mix with the smell of ground coffee beans, people smile at each other. “Good morning” and “thank-you” are genuine, not HR-directed practices. Good manners spread, a virus of consideration and kindness toward the stranger next to you in line. Everything seems to work better and the day is a little brighter.
It’s time for corporate and political America to wake up and “smell the coffee”. We, The People want a Better America.
One based in good manners. Humane, inclusive and transparent practices for the good of everyone in our society. We want a clear agenda of change that includes workers’ rights and protections. A legal system that has equality and justice-directed enforcements. Affordable education. Respect.
America is barely 246 years old. Our version of democracy is an evolving experiment. It’s time for the system to pivot again. Time for both politicians and corporations to say “thank you” and hold the door open for their workers. It’s time. Make America Better.
But when and while the USA collapses, the rest of the world continues and are all ready to fill the vacuum that the USA leaves behind.
The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) conducted an exercise near the island of Taiwan on Monday with the largest number of warplanes ever recorded, which could be a rehearsal of a reunification-by-force operation, again sending a clear warning to Taiwan secessionists and the US that have been making provocative moves to escalate tensions in the region, Chinese mainland experts said on Tuesday.
A US aircraft carrier exited the South China Sea via waters south of the island of Taiwan also on Monday, a region close to the PLA warplane exercise. And analysts said the PLA displayed the capability of driving away foreign forces interfering in the Taiwan question.
Twenty-five PLA aircraft, namely two Y-8 anti-submarine warfare aircraft, one KJ-500 early warning aircraft, four J-10 and 14 J-16 fighter jets, and four H-6K bombers, entered Taiwan's self-proclaimed southwest air defense identification zone on Monday, the island's defense authorities said late that day.
The number of PLA warplanes featured in the exercise was a record since Taiwan's defense authorities began to release information about PLA aircraft activities in the region on September 17, 2020, surpassing the previous record of 20 on March 26. The number of J-16s, a powerful fighter jet, was also the biggest of all exercises, media on the island said on Monday.
The exercise conducted by the PLA served as a warning to Taiwan secessionists and the US after the two had made a series of provocative moves, mainland analysts said.
On Saturday, the US Department of State announced new guidelines to encourage US government engagement with the island that reflects their "deepening unofficial relationship." Officials on the island recently also claimed that the island is drawing a line 30 nautical miles away from the island, attempting to deny PLA aircraft approaches.
Monday's exercise was characterized by the large number of aircraft, and as the PLA deepens its regular, combat-scenario drills near the island of Taiwan, the scale could continue to expand in the future. As this is normal, related parties should get used to it if they insist on provoking, Fu Qianshao, a Chinese mainland military aviation expert, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
Taiwan's secessionist forces and the US must stop making provocations unless they hope to see further escalations in the region, mainland experts warned, noting that the PLA is taking pragmatic steps to make sure it can effectively reunify the island of Taiwan if it comes to that.
The exercise could be a rehearsal of its combat plan over the Taiwan island, and it could feature air superiority seizure, and attack on land and maritime targets, including warships of interfering foreign countries, Song Zhongping, a Chinese mainland military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
PLA's Y-8 anti-submarine aircraft target foreign submarines, the KJ-500 commands the battlefield, the H-6Ks attack maritime and land targets, the J-10s seize air superiority, while the J-16s plays a multirole of both aerial combat and attack, Song said.
Coinciding with the PLA's warplane exercise, the Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group, which held a series of drills in the South China Sea in the past week, left the South China Sea via south of the Taiwan island on the same day, according to the monitoring of the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI), a Beijing-based think tank, on Monday.
Overlying the flight paths of PLA warplanes released by Taiwan's defense authorities and the movement of the Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier released by SCSPI, observers said they were not far away from each other.
Citing analysts on the island of Taiwan, Taipei-based Central News Agency reported on Monday that the PLA warplanes likely simulated attacks on the US aircraft carrier.
Fu said that the PLA has been conducting daily exercises in the region, and it is the US warships' presence that is irregular. "If they pose potential threats to China's national security, we will surely take countermeasures, including monitoring," he said.
The PLA is rightfully responsible to safeguard peace and stability in the region when foreign warships and warplanes stir up tensions and make provocations, Fu said.
Similar exercises demonstrated that the PLA is capable of cutting off foreign interventions in the Taiwan region if the situation arises, as it has a powerful aerial combat system to drive away foreign maritime forces, including aircraft carrier strike groups, a Beijing-based military expert who requested anonymity told the Global Times on Tuesday.
China’s Artificial Sun Just Smashed a Fusion World Record
China’s “artificial sun” tokamak has sustained a plasma reaction for a whopping 101 seconds at 120 million degrees Celsius, setting new records in the field of nuclear fusion. The breakthrough could pave the way for a carbon-neutral energy future.
EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak), or HT-7U, is a custom-built fusion reactor that has operated in different phases since 2006. Like many of the world’s tokamak experiments, EAST has reached fusion before. As a refresher, inside the donut-shaped (or, sometimes, more spherical) containment of a tokamak, sun-hot plasma swirls in a circle that’s held in place by supercooled electromagnets.
This magnetic field is the only thing floating between 360-million-degree plasma and a bunch of human-made materials that obviously can’t sustain that temperature. The plasma results from smashing different nuclei together, fusing them rather than splitting them.
This requires a huge energy investment, which critics say means fusion will never really get off the ground. And so far, all tokamaks work for just a scant few seconds at lower temperatures before something goes wrong.
This is why EAST—which just properly “turned on” last December—running for 101 seconds at 120 million Celsius is such a huge deal. It’s a double whammy: a very long runtime at an extraordinarily high temperature. In 2018, the tokamak reached 180 million degrees Fahrenheit, or about 82 million degrees Celsius. But back then, EAST could only sustain the plasma for around 10 seconds.
That’s not hot enough or long enough, but 120 million degrees Celsius and 101 seconds, which EAST achieved in late May, certainly are. So, this is a record for both the required power-generating temperature and the duration for keeping the temperature at a stable level.
As for other high-profile reactors around the world, the U.K.’s MAST reactor recently made headlines with a new exhaust system that reduces heat 10 times better than its predecessor. In the meantime, the global International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is on track to build the hugest tokamak ever, with first plasma projected in 2030. Each experimental reactor has goals to help push technology forward to help all the others.
The future of EAST could involve lessons learned by ITER, Korea’s KSTAR reactor (which held the previous fusion record), MAST, and even private tokamak researchers that are chipping away at the major obstacles to fusion energy. All have the same goal: to sustain an extremely hot reaction and keep their equipment safely running for as long as possible.
Gosh! All of this stuff about society, and culture really makes me hunger for some fine Louisianian cooking!
Do you all have any idea what I am in the mood for? I am yearning for something like this…
Some fine Southern American food.
I’ll bet you that you don’t. I’ll bet that you are thinking something like steak, a find hamburger, or some pizza or lasagna. Nope. That’s not what I am yearning for.
I know that many Americans in the audience don’t “get it”. But that’s because everyone can get mashed potatoes, corn, and cheesy elbows. But not here. they are special treats. Not to mention deep fried catfish and chicken.
If you have the ability to eat this fine, but basic food, then do so. I think that it’s wonderful. It’s delicious and wonderful and the smells and the taste are wonderful.
Do you wonder why China is asking serious questions?
Beijing called on the US to explain a respiratory disease outbreak in northern Virginia in July, 2019 and a large-scale outbreak of e-cigarette disease in Wisconsin.
“When will the US release detailed data and information on relevant cases to the international community? The United States owes an explanation to the international community.”
Can you imagine what will happen if China is kinetically attacked?
A big part of the US industrial base is now in China.
The US would be attacking its own sources of food, commodities, and its own supply chain.
Looking at Elsberg’s ‘warning’ is this not a spectacular example of insane short-term thinking?
To end this section, taking the previous summary and adding one point, it looks like this:
Ellsberg warns that the same talks that happened 50 years ago to possibly strike China with nuclear weapons is no doubt happening in the Pentagon today. Is the Ellsberg warning more serious than what we think?
Yang Jiechi and Nikolai Patrushev states that Russia and China must coordinate in order to establish a new order to replace the US-dominated one, once the latter gets totally dysfunctional.
China is mass producing hyper-velocity MIRV ICBM’s armed with massive warheads in a frantic pace.
Pentagon Insiders are horrified by the discussions and all warn that not only would America lose a war, but that could be destroyed and subjugated to an unfathomable degree.
The US has clearly and unequivocally used bioweapons (even excluding Vietnam), in the past, and hidden this.
Conclusion: Unfortunately the mindset has not changed and the actions have not changed since the time described in both the Ellsberg report, or the reveals of the Needham report. This is currently the danger and is what we mean by doubling-down.
But I’m not done about Louisiana food…
Throughout the deep American South people eat this kind of food called BBQ. But you know, it must be the most misunderstood BBQ in America. In Boston, for instance a BBQ sandwich was nothing more than cold sliced ham and BBQ sauce. Ugh!
When in actuality, it’s really slow cooked brisket served on a hot toasty bun just dripping and oozing with delicious and tasty sauce.
I could use one right now.
Mississippi style BBQ.
Maybe with an icy beer.
Or two.
Another Cajun roadside specialty, cracklins, are Louisiana’s version of pork rinds. Fatty pork bits that puff up into something special, these savory morsels provide some crunchy bites, some chewy bites and some melty edges. It’s an altogether beautiful experience, especially when it happens at Don’s Specialty Meats in Scott, La. These are the ultimate road-trip snack.
I remember going on work related travel to different factories throughout the Southern American states. AN we would make a point to stop at the various BBQ place sand sample their food. The BBQ varied regionally from place to place. All were just great! Just simply great!
Following on from the last China Sitrep, we have banking news, a cute helicopter and drone soccer.
E-Hang’s electric VT-30 travels 300km in 100 minutes. With eight propellers, two fixed wings, and a propeller at the rear, it achieves a balance of hybrid lift and push, so needs no runway. Its tri-redundant, fly-by-wire controls can be flexibly altered for multiple modes, implying a much higher safety level for the aircraft. Read full article →
Chinese scientists set a new world record of achieving a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds in the latest experiment on Friday, a key step toward the test running of a fusion reactor. Read full article →
China dominates consumer and commercial drones globally, and 369 exhibitors showcased 2,000 drone products in Shenzen this week. Mini drones the size of a wristwatch hovered next to cargo drones like four-seater planes. Kids played 3v3 drone soccer before a crowd of adoring parents. Read full article →
(They also say they need a million drone pilots!)
The Maglev trains are just running faster: A groundbreaking ceremony launched a 620 mph maglev test line. The train uses superconducting magnetic levitation to disengage from the ground to eliminate frictional drag and a near-vacuum internal duct lines to dramatically reduce air resistance to achieve its speed. Read full article →
European BRI Rail Freight rose 100% in 2020. Austria’s Rail Cargo Group (RCG) transported 70,000 TEUs across BRI routes and, compared to 2019, doubled its Eurasian volumes and reached an all-time high of 700 trains running on these routes, This year, the company aims to run 1,000 freight trains. Read full article →
Oh, gumbo. Served from a big ol’ pot, it’s the kind of food that warms your heart, your soul and your belly, all at the same time. It starts with a roux, the flavorful base of fat and flour, which gets added to the holy trinity (onions, bell peppers and celery). From there, gumbo can go in many directions, most popularly chicken and sausage or a seafood medley. Around Easter, there’s a special bowl of Gumbo Z’Herbes served at Dooky Chase’s in New Orleans, made with bright, verdant greens. The rest of the year, you can’t go wrong with the seafood rendition from Li’l Dizzy’s (also in New Orleans), which makes a regular appearance on the lunch buffet (along with killer fried chicken and mac and cheese).
But the USA has signed agreements with the G7 nations to construct an American BRI to go “head to head” with the Chinese BRI.
Show me the money, the G7’s B3W will have a hard time replacing China’s BRI.
Biden and the G7s Build Back Better for the World (B3W) program is going to have a hard time without money and so far no one will say where it will come from.
Finding the massive $40+ tn needed for infrastructure needed in the developing world won’t be easy. The US can’t agree on its own domestic infrastructure spending and how much money can it print for B3?
Comments that the private sector will pay are utter nonsense.
Say what you will China have already funded $4tn in projects. Most importantly, China saw the need in the developing world long before the West.
The real question is where was the G7 for the past decade?
Another major issue is that B3W funds will come with strings attached on democratic values, human rights, climate change, corruption, and the rule of law. Good luck.
In the end it comes down to “Show me the money.”
Cats and Louisiana BBQ.
I used to have cats when I lived in Mississippi and Louisiana, and Texas. But you know, they were always happy to nibble on a piece of sliced brisket or chicken. But over all, my cats were just as happy to eat fish or whatever I had on hand. For them, eating a slice of brisket or a McDonald’s creamer when I brought home a couple of cups of coffee were a real treat. I would drink my coffee, and they would have their creamers. Special times.
Cat eating a hamburger. I used to share my subway sandwiches with my cats. They loved the chicken and the meatball subs.
And this warning is being ignored in the Pentagon. Which is why there are people speaking out warning that the neocons inside of Washington are fucking bat-shit crazy nuts, and America will not survive their arrogance and idiocy.
Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng said China will never allow the island of Taiwan to go independent as Beijing hit back at a US-Japan joint statement which for the first time in half a century mentioned China's Taiwan.
"National reunification of the island of Taiwan and China is a historical process. It will not be stopped by anyone or any force. We will never let Taiwan go independent," Le made the remarks on Friday in an interview with the Associated Press.
Asked if there was any timeline for the reunification and if the current situation could continue to exist for many years, Le stressed that "it's a process of history."
Le said China is firmly committed to safeguarding national sovereignty, security and promoting national reunification. "We are prepared to do everything we can for a peaceful reunification. That said, we don't pledge to give up other options. No option is excluded."
Le's remarks comes amidst the recent provocation from the US and Japan's joint statement.
The direct mentioning of Taiwan was regarded as a severe interference in China's domestic affairs and sends a signal that Japan and the US are attempting to challenge China's possible moves to reunification.
Chinese analysts said the US and Japan's move will only send the wrong signal to the Taiwan separatists and allow the DPP to go further down the wrong path.
Le stressed the one-China principle is China's red line and no one should try to cross it, whether low-level or high-level, official engagement is what China firmly opposes.
"The Taiwan question bears on China's core interests. There is simply no room for compromise," the Chinese vice foreign minister noted.
CIPS is proceeding without delay
Maybe SWIFT will collapse upon itself.
China ramped up its Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) and set up clearing banks at all major offshore yuan trading hubs, like Hong Kong, Singapore, London, and Frankfurt. The CIPS clearing system operates during work hours of financial markets in every time zone.
Russia does not expect impossible outcomes from the upcoming summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Joe Biden in Geneva, and the two sides are unlikely to resolve important issues at the meeting, Russian Ambassador to China Andrey Denisov told the Global Times in an exclusive interview.
The ambassador noted that if the two leaders talk about issues related to China during their meeting, Russia will discuss them with the Chinese side. He stressed that Russia-China relations will not change no matter what attitude the US takes toward Russia.
Putin and Biden are set to meet in Geneva on June 16, the first meeting between the two leaders since Biden took office.
Some analysts believed that during their first bilateral meeting, Biden and Putin will discuss topics including strategic stability, disarmament, ecology, COVID-19 and conflicts in hot spots.
Denisov told the Global Times that Russia welcomes any measures that reduce tensions and competition, but they are also very cautious about what they can expect from Russian-American relations, especially in the context of the very tense relationship between the two countries.
He said Russia is a "realist" and does not expect impossible outcomes, and the summit is not likely to resolve important issues between the two countries. A better outcome is one that sets conditions for resolving problems in the future, said the diplomat.
Media reports showed that while the upcoming summit is seen by some analysts as an "ice-breaking" opportunity to reshape US-Russia relations, the two sides have been talking tough to each other and sending signals to lower external expectations ahead of the summit. Biden vowed to be tough with Russia and press it on human rights, while Putin has said he does not expect any breakthroughs from his meeting with US counterpart.
Some analysts pointed out that while it would be hard to break the ice in US-Russia relations, the US should stabilize relations and ease tensions with Russia so as to concentrate on dealing with China. As a result, the Geneva meeting may become an opportunity to lobby Russia.
In response to this view, Denisov told the Global Times that the idea that Russia would alienate China over the possibility of the US temporarily easing tensions with Russia is "very short-sighted."
"Russia is smarter than Americans think," he said.
The diplomat said that during the visit of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to China and the visit of Yang Jiechi, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, to Russia, both sides discussed US topics. If the US and Russia talk about issues related to China during the upcoming summit, the Russian side will also communicate and discuss it with China.
Idiocracy: Flawed comedy or terrifyingly prescient science fiction?
It should be no surprise to anyone that our culture is rapidly drowning in lowbrow media. The perception that as a race we are being worryingly dumbed-down is not something new. Is this gradual intellectual decline something we can stop? Or is it the inevitable trajectory of our current society? One film that has managed to stay relevant seven years after release is Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s satirical take on our dumbed-down future. But for a comedy that was a little low on laughs for my liking, why has it caused such controversy and managed to stay in the public consciousness so long? And should we be worried that this film is accurately predicting our future?
The funny side of idiocy
Idiocracy manages to have a sense of humour about the potential bleakness of our shared stupidity-induced future. Mike Judge’s 2006 comedy Idiocracy did just that, though was sadly overlooked at the time of its release. The film isn’t Judge’s best, with the comedy often falling a little flat. Idiocracy couldn’t possibly hold a torch to Judge’s Office Space (1999). The core idea behind Idiocracy is what makes it worthy of remembering: a satirical view of Earth’s future where everyone is incredibly stupid. Sounds simple enough, and not too hard to imagine (wait, there’s another reality TV show starting?!). All these years later, this small film is still causing a stir.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with this now cult film, the premise is fairly simple. Joe (Luke Wilson) is an average guy, put into stasis as part of a scientific experiment. When the experiment is cancelled, he is forgotten and left in stasis, waking up accidentally 500 years in the future. The future is a bleak one, where the average IQ of the world is worryingly low.
A misunderstood sentiment
According to Matt Novak on Gizmodo’s Paleofuture, the film is an affront for suggesting eugenics is the answer to this potentially dire future, and anyone who enjoys the film should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
Does anyone else think he’s missing the point a little bit? Sorry to disagree with you Matt, but I actually always thought Judge was being satirical. I don’t believe that he ever wanted to argue for eugenics. The rich vs poor set-up is again a deliberate choice, highlighting the prejudiced views of both ends of the economical spectrum. Not, as Novak argues, a simple boiling down of the situation to ‘the intelligent people are wealthy, while the uneducated people are poor.’ I would say that cheating husbands with a dozen kids is just as stereotypical as a frigid, unpleasant, career-driven, rich couple.
Novak claims that the film makes an unhealthy link between wealth and intelligence, but like many satirical films, it uses stereotypes to highlight the issues with that kind of thinking. In other words, Judge is using those precise stereotypes to make a point. Novak’s disgust at the stereotypes being used is entirely missing the point.
Nature vs nurture
The real premise of the film, in my opinion, is an argument for respecting nurture over and above nature. As such, it is in direct opposition to an argument of eugenics. The ‘stupidity’ that has taken hold of the country results in a great wealth of knowledge being lost. It is not the genius scientists, but the more menial labourers and their work that is missed most. Judge’s futuristic world needs mechanics to fix their robotic helpers, bin men and janitors to clean the country, gardeners, builders, etc. Is Judge really bemoaning the loss of the highly intelligent or asking us to look back at the basic pillars that keep our society going?
If you look at the main character’s story arc, the argument for nurture over nature is overtly apparent: you see an average man who was looked down on and not treated with much respect in his own time. When he is re-awakened in the future and found to be more intelligent, the nurturing atmosphere helps him to rise up and do more than he ever could have in the negative environment he was in before. The film is asking us to remember that everyone has potential, and that we need to be supportive of that no matter what their economic circumstances, who their families were, where they came form, etc.
While Idiocracy had a tiny limited release at the cinema back in 2006. Since then, it has found its place as a cultural yardstick for the dumbing down of society. When people bemoan the intellectual lows to which our society has sunk, referencing Idiocracy, I don’t believe that anyone is implying we should employ the use of the discredited science of eugenics. If anything, the film encourages us to always nurture potential, both intellectual and artistic.
A Historical piece from the 2nd World War
The secret deportations: how Britain betrayed the Chinese men who served the country in the war
During the second world war, Chinese merchant seamen helped keep Britain fed, fuelled and safe – and many gave their lives doing so. But from late 1945, hundreds of them who had settled in Liverpool suddenly disappeared. Now their children are piecing together the truth
I like to believe that every problem in the world can be resolved with generous quantities of alcohol, fine delicious food, smiling and happy people, and dogs and cats scurrying about.
Taste of New Orleans : Creole Food.
The world decoupling from the horrible U.S. economy
Well, just how does the world break its dollar habit?
The most clear explanation I ever heard as to why the dollar maintains its global status is really quite straightforward, the U.S. trade deficit. USD’s are constantly filling everyone’s foreign exchange reserve, so almost everyone has these extra dollars to use for trading between themselves.
Sow how does one get rid of this gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe?
Buying treasuries – no, that is investing directly in the USD.
Buying assets in the U.S. – no, same problem as 1, you have assets valued in USD and something the U.S. govt can seize from you.
Buying assets in other countries – dang, you just gave them a boatload of dollars, that stuff is like dark matter.
Buy hard assets in the U.S. and ship it back to China – this is your best bet, buy gold, silver, platinum, or any hard asset and ship it to your vaults, now does the U.S. let you do that?
An article published by Foreign Policy on Tuesday, entitled "China and Russia Turn Deeper Ties into a Military Challenge for Biden," quoted an former US politician as saying the US faces "a two-front war where we don't have a two-front military." This seems to be an emerging possible scenario that is puzzling some American analysts.
On April 14, Reuters published a similar commentary headlined "US faces test on Taiwan, Ukraine," which articulated the concern.
Yet the test is caused by the US itself, thanks to its recklessness in handling major global issues. It is Washington itself which has been stirring up troubles worldwide, rather than resolving crises. Now the tactic is backfiring - Western media are becoming concerned that "rising tension over both Ukraine and Taiwan is putting the Biden administration in a bind," or worse, lead to "a two-front war."
The Taiwan question is China's domestic affair, where the US is not supposed to interfere at all. The Ukraine crisis involves the issue that should be decided by the Ukrainian people. But the US won't cease creating tensions over it.
US political elites have shown little interest in self reflection. More importantly, they attach too much significance to major power geopolitical games. In their eyes, if the US makes concessions over the Ukraine issue, it could result in Russia returning to Europe. In that case, everything Washington has been struggling for over the past 30 years since the end of the Cold War will crumble to dust.
When it comes to Taiwan, the US regards the island, from the military perspective, as a crucial link in its first island chain to contain China. Diplomatically, the US is utilizing the island as leverage to boost secessionist forces in China, in an attempt to split the latter, or launch a "peaceful revolution."
Suppressing Russia and China has been a long tradition in US politics. Apart from former US president Donald Trump, who once attempted to cozy up to Russia, yet failed due to opposition from the Democratic Party, most US presidents tend to pile pressure on both countries. Yet the problem is that the US has found it increasingly difficult to do so.
The US' biggest challenge is at home, not so-called threats from China or Russia. If the US hastily engages in, or creates more external geopolitical tests, while not having resolved its own domestic problems, it will only have its nose rubbed in the dust both at home and abroad, not to mention winning the "battle" on either side.
The US has its own calculations. It is hoping to push the EU to the forefront of the Ukraine crisis, letting the EU invest in more resources while the US could just play a commanding role. In addition, although the US reiterated its support for Ukraine, the latter's top diplomat has been stressing that Ukraine "is looking for more than words," Politico reported on April 13. It means the US' capability is very limited. It is just like the way Washington is dealing with Beijing - trying to establish an anti-China camp with as many allies as possible. If the US believes it can handle the Taiwan question and Ukraine crisis as it wishes, or in other words, China and Russia, at the same time, it has overestimated its strength and wisdom.
The truth is, the US is not confronting two tests, but three. The biggest crisis is from its home affairs. The biggest battlefield for US policymakers is on US soil. The best solution for elites in Washington is to put more energy in focusing on their country's domestic puzzles and stop creating troubles abroad.
Why is the American leadership so out of touch? Are the suck?
And Taiwan…
American neocons are pushing, pushing, pushing for a war regarding Taiwan.
... China remained the top issue on her mind, and on the minds of her fellow Republicans in the room. Haley hammered home that China remained an existential threat to the U.S. and democracies around the world and that government officials there should never be trusted.
Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative, building bridges, tunnels and other infrastructure projects in dozens of nations, is nothing more than a ploy to gain influence and power around the world, Haley said.
"What they're doing is they're running out the deck for such a time as this and then waiting for times like COVID. And they say, 'You can't pay it? Now give me your power grid. Now give me your military installation. We want your port.' Now you look at that map - it will send a chill up your spine at what they're trying to do."
Haley also painted a haunting portrait of the war China is waging in cyberspace. Beijing, she said, just adopted a data-security measure that states that all private data is now a national asset.
"Think about the health data they have. Think about the financial data they have. Think about the surveillance actions they have on all of us," Haley said. "Now think that that's in the hands of the Chinese military. The way President Xi sees it is, whoever owns the data rules the world."
Haley was asked by one GOP lawmaker how the U.S. could respond to China when it sells pharmaceuticals, medical equipment and so many cheap goods to America.
"Don't lead with fear. Don't be scared of China. Go after them strong. Go after them aggressively," the former ambassador said.
-Nikki Haley warns Republicans on China: 'If they take Taiwan, it's all over'
American generals say otherwise…
While acknowledging that uniting with Taiwan is a "core interest" for China, Milley signaled that he thought Beijing will pursue such ambitions through peaceful means.
"The internal politics of China are up to China, as long as whatever is done is done peacefully and doesn't destabilize the region nor the world," Milley said.
Milley appeared in front of the committee to discuss the Pentagon's Fiscal 2022 budget request, alongside Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
Rachel Esplin Odell, a research fellow in the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute, said Milley's comments "basically reaffirmed the longstanding U.S. One China Policy, which includes the understanding that the United States supports any peaceful, uncoerced resolution of cross-Strait differences."
"However, a somewhat more accurate statement of longstanding policy would have been that cross-Strait differences are up to both China and Taiwan to resolve peacefully through mutual agreement,"
"Nonetheless, Gen. Milley's comments are, on the whole, a welcome corrective to dangerous rhetoric from some analysts and politicians in Washington that portrays Taiwan as a strategic asset for the United States that must be kept separate from China. It is encouraging that Gen. Milley recognizes that danger," she said.
-Nikkei
What is the USA doing?
All of this isn’t secret information. It’s obvious and only the most deluded sheeple can’t see the build up towards war that the United States is marching towards. Knowing what is spread out before you all, as above. And noting that China and Russia are not fools.
What do you think they are going to do? Wait until the USA does something stupid? Or are they going to take proactive steps to castrate the “mad dog” before it infects the entire world with it’s madness?
I tire of this insanity.
It makes me want to gather up all the lunatics, lock them up in cages and bury them deep deep down in a place that they cannot harm themselves, or anyone around them.
But on the bright side there is China.
And China is doing well, they know what is going on. They are strong and formidable. And no matter what crazy-assed plans the Idiocracity world of America might think up, China is there to deal with them promptly.
American leadership in Washington DC as depicted in the movie Idiocracity.
I hope you enjoyed this visit in news that is unavailable to Americans. I’m tired and hungry. You probably didn’t notice. So I am going to go and eat some food. Have a great day you all!
I’ll leave you with this…
Why do people want to believe in lies about China when they know those lies come from their machinery of lies (politicians and MSM) which people already know do nothing but lie? Answer: They’re racist hypocrites. Turns out it’s not just a hunch.
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Well, aside from being thrown into a Thai jail for a couple of weeks, that is.
Anyways, here is a piece that I found on the UNZ site. It’s worth a read, not so much for the content (which is good) but for the comments that it attracted. You end up seeing a nice group of American society in the disparagement column, and some thoughtful analysis in the Brit and Aussie columns.
I like to read what other expats have to say about their experiences. As, well you should all know, everyone has a story and often those of expats tend to be the most colorful. This particular story revolves around a fellow in Thailand who made the mistake of fighting back when he was being scammed by locals. That’s a big no-no.
We have a saying in America. It goes like this… “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”.
The phrase ‘when in Rome, do as the Romans do’ means that ‘when you are living in, or visiting, a community of people, you should follow the laws and customs of that community’. Literally, the proverb means that when you are in Rome, you should act like the Romans.
-'When in Rome, do as the Romans do'
Well, he didn’t follow this very simple advice, and ended up paying for that mistake. This is his story. And the comments are really interesting.
As with all reprints, the usual disclaimer apply.
For young guys, yes… rise up and abandon the creeping meatball. I don’t care if it’s the UK meatball, the US meatball…. just get out while you can. There is serious talk of raising exit fees!
-Franz
As an expat myself, I am both charmed and repelled by the experiences of other Americans as the peek outside of the gulag that the inhabit.
Some comments are gold. Some remind me of bad experience I have had with Jerk-offs, and others remind me of just why I left. I really enjoy the more thoughtful and productive comments, and dialogs. they point to some interesting trends.
The ‘least developed’ European countries have the most interesting long-term prospects, at least as places I like to live."
Yeah, and they know it.
I worked steel, plus allied fabrications. These countries are buying up razor wire faster than anyone can make it! Trust me, in a few years, countries that are not yet holes will be off limits to wanderers.
-Franz
While you are reading it, please keep in mind that one person’s happiness is meaningless to another. We all live within our very own realities.
One person’s happiness is meaningless to another. We all live within our very own realities.
Here is the article with comments embedded within.
gotmituns says:
The only ones “escaping” from our wonderful and proud American nation are the cowards and shirkers who wouldn’t do either side any good when the shit hits the fan in this country. Nobody needs such people in their midst.
With my Escape from America series, I’ve interviewed American ex-pats who have settled in Mexico, the Philippines, Hungary, Costa Rica, Brazil or England, etc., but you’re constantly escaping from one country to the next, with the goal of experiencing all 180 of them! What made you choose such an unusual lifestyle, and how did you prepare yourself for it?
No preparation whatsoever and, in fact, no plan.
I’d had what’s called a ‘liquidity event’ back in NYC. Two, actually: a startup sale and then an IPO. Which just means I don’t have to work again if I don’t want to.
I was burnt out. 15 years of 10 hour days, grinding towards some pointless goal of accumulation. When I cashed-out I wasn’t sure what to do next.
I looked around and decided it was time to leave NYC and the US in general.
The path the country was heading down was pretty obvious to anyone willing to look.
So I threw a bunch of stuff in storage. Locked up the apartment. And left.
That was 2017 and I’ve only returned now and then: for weddings or near-deaths.
I hope to never have to return permanently.
Radicalcenter says:
... mere permanent residency in another country never requires giving up US citizenship, so why renounce US citizenship if mere permanent residency in the other country suits one’s purposes?
(Permanent residents often have the right to use the public healthcare system the same as citizens. Some countries, like Russia, give them the right to vote in local elections.)
US citizens who reside abroad full-time do indeed have to file a US income tax return even on income earned abroad.
But in 2021, a married couple can exclude the first $217,400 per year from US federal taxation:
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/figuring-the-foreign-earned-income-exclusion
In 2022 the exclusion rises with inflation, probably to $224-225,000.
The system is unfair, grasping, and should be abolished.
But American worldwide taxation shouldn’t be a deterrent for most Americans who would seriously consider residing abroad. Seriously, what percentage of older American couples moving abroad will have more than $225,000 in income per year while they are retired?
Not many.
In Tirana, I ran into a folk singer who performed in Turkish, but was actually an American! In his early 40’s, “Dandelion Lakewood” left the States nearly 6 years ago, and has been in Europe ever since, mostly in the Balkans. Busking, he needs just $12 a day to survive.
In Tirana, Dandy was paying $8 daily to share a room with another American. Dandy has slept outside, it’s not a problem.
Different people have different requirements. You’re obviously in a different category, but most Americans with cash would not have made your choice. You told me you once drove from Atlanta to Juarez to sample an interesting Chinese buffet. Do you think you’ll ever get tired of traveling? If so, where might you settle down, and why?
Right.
And I don’t make the money point to brag or anything. I just got lucky. Right place, right time.
The bigger point I wanted to make is that guys like me are leaving the US in droves. Even before the pandemic.
We are not better or smarter than those that didn’t get lucky.
But I think some of us realized that the “juice wasn’t worth the squeeze”. So we bailed.
I feel a kinship with anyone that has left America, regardless of their situation.
PJ London says:
You sound like 99.9% of Americans, totally anal and caring only about their bank balance.
The rest of the world (and yes I have lived in 8 countries) have a far better life, as they do not rank existence on the thickness of their wallet.
Given a free choice and some income I would live in a Muslim country or eastern European. I would move to Abkhazia tomorrow if I could. Unfortunately, in my 70s, my travel and choices have become limited.
In terms of traveling and settling down.
I don’t know.
I have a reckless streak. I always have. Going to Juarez to eat Chinese food, or moving a bunch of gold over the Burmese border, or spending weeks in a Thai jail, or designing the interior of some Chechen billionaire’s yacht. I just can’t stop collecting experiences.
That, to me, is real wealth.
I’ve been to around 90 countries at this point.
There are a handful of places I could see myself staying long-term. For me, they have the right combination of cost of living/quality of life. Decent infrastructure. Nice people. Low-ish inequality coefficient.
They’re usually Muslim/Asian countries.
I think that was the biggest surprise.
I want to avoid the forced degeneracy of the West.
This is weird as, in my youth, I was the biggest champion of orgies and drugs and personal freedom and all that faux-liberal youth-culture decadent bullshit.
Alfred says:The issuance of a second valid passport should therefore be considered an exception to the one passport policy and will be issued at the discretion of the Consular Officer. If issued it will be valid for a maximum of two years.
U.S. Embassy and Consulate in the Netherlands – Second Passports
I like being around happy, multi-generational families.
People eating together as a family or flying kites in a park or a group of old-timers nursing a 3-hour conversation over a cup of coffee.
They still do that!
I am not ready to stop.
Perhaps that is the recklessness I was referring to earlier.
In German, real estate is ‘Immobilen’. It’s ‘immobiliere’ in French. Even without knowing Kraut or French, I bet you can deduce the meaning… purchasing a home renders one immobile.
A lease is a landlock.
You’re stuck in one place, one culture, one point of view.
To stay in the same place still seems like death to me.
Or perhaps a series of small compromises, small deaths, that add up to a more prolonged expiation.
Disclaimer says:
The introduction of Nassim Talebs book “Black Swan” has a interesting paragraph about growing up in Lebanon in the 1960s. It is worth revisiting...
"Increasingly, Celebrities and the upper 10% of US society have been getting second passports for themselves and their families for quite some time. After the financial crisis of 2007-08 it seems this trend accelerated. Its also illuminating how many of the upper 10% also have real estate overseas. These people are not doing these measures for fun. And they sure as heck keep their Plan B quiet."
The goal of travel is to court and embrace discomfort.
Otherwise, you’re just a fat Boomer on a cruise!
What did you do to spend weeks in a Thai jail?! And how were you treated by the other inmates?
To many white nationalists, Muslims are just low IQ losers, and Orientals are just conformists with disgusting culinary habits, yet both groups have managed to maintain their heritage, and hence dignity, better than the degenerate West. Is there any hope for white people, or are they condemned to rage impotently online as their societies unravel? Is Europe better off than America? And which European countries do you think have the best prospects?
The Thailand story is sad–and typical.
I’ll tell it here as a warning to anyone reading.
This stuff happens and, in retrospect, you should not handle the situation in the way I did. Linh, you can chop this if you don’t think it’s relevant.
I was in one of those seedy beach resort towns filled with decaying, SPAM-tinted Anglo men and their 21-year-old Isaan wives.
I was talking to as many of the men as I could, as they figure fairly prominently in a book I am working on.
A few of the blokes had warned me of a scam going on in that particular town.
The locals would wait until you rented a scooter and had a few beers at some local bar. Then, when you scooted off home, they’d put three teenagers on a shittier scooter than yours and drive full speed into you. The cops would conveniently be nearby to handle the proceedings.
I ignored this warning as typical ‘falang’ fearmongering.
But sure enough, a week into my stay this happened to me.
I’d had a big Chang beer and puttered off home.
Three kids on a crappy Vespa (motor scooter) hit me out of nowhere. Cops come out. from behind a nearby building: ‘You drunk Mister! You come to station and make right!’ They sounded like some Hollywood-stereotype from the 80s. But they were real and extremely angry.
I was terrified.
I had had a beer and driven my scooter (like everyone else in that town) but I had no idea what my ‘rights’ were.
Ha!
We went to the station and the officer demanded 40,000 baht to make it go away, plus some money for each of the three teenagers that were on the scooter.
In the meantime, they had already gone to the hospital after the accident and returned, bandaged up, with hospital bills ready to go.
They’d done this under an hour.
All three presented the hospital bills to me meekly.
I think they were another 60,000 baht.
Conveniently, 100,000 baht is the maximum you can withdraw from a Thai bank branch in one day.
Around $3k.
I told them this was absurd.
I ‘knew my rights’. Typical American arrogance.
After two hours of yelling at each other via Google Translate in their sweaty little station, they made me go back to my apartment and give them my passport, told me they’d be in touch and that I was not to leave Thailand.
Jeff Stryker says:
Michigan Native & Long-term South East Asia (SEA) Expat Here
I cannot say I would prefer a Thai jail but I would live on Thai beach in a fishing hut & let lizards crawl up my anus before I would return to the low-cost housing of Greater Detroit Washtenaw county.
I spent 30 K building my estate here & the irony is that my grandmother’s condo in Washtenaw County was worth $400 K in 1986 & after it was sold 20 years later it was worth 50 K-and my brother told me that whoever bought it was a fool. That is property value in Michigan for you.
Not long ago on FB I got ahold of a Polish kid who shared my dorm room at Central. The poor fool is still stuck in Flint. His formerly tidy if modest Polish-Catholic neighborhood is one great big crack house.
So that is one expat’s response.
As for Canukistan, well, they may export our leaders but try immigrating there. They don’t want us.
Americans that travel a lot can legally have two passports.
Not a lot of people know this.
It’s the same passport number but you can usually bank on the fact that if you get into trouble somewhere, it will take time for the various government departments to communicate with each other, and you have a window to clear the country.
I’d talked with a nice local lawyer girl after this happened and her advice was to get the hell out of Thailand. So that’s what I did.
I was gone within 48 hours, this time via a land border, which I assumed was insecure.
I crossed into Cambodia, made my way to Phnom Penh, and then flew to Bali for a few weeks.
Stupidly, I returned to Thailand a month later.
I thought somehow the problem would have ‘gone away’, as it was all a scam.
Ha!
They grabbed me at the airport, after clearing customs. That’s always the shitty part. They let you clear customs and grab your bag, thinking you are free. And then they grab you.
My passport number had been communicated to Border Police.
They were as surprised as I was that I had returned!
The charges were now serious.
In addition to injuring others on a scooter, I had tried to flee the country.
A few other minor charges.
Worst case: I was facing up to 3 years in a Thai prison.
I would now be remanded until I had a chance to appear before a judge. There were a series of holidays going on, related to the new King’s ascension, so the whole country was closed for at least a week. Bad timing on my part.
I spent around two weeks in a Thai jail back in the town where the crime had been committed.
Mulga Mumblebrain says:
It is very hard to contemplate leaving your homeland. Just leaving Sydney, that I knew like the back of my hand, but was unaffordable, was a dreadful break.
Unfortunately, Australia, that from c.1970 to 1990 was making good progress in creating a decent society, has since fallen into the Pit of Hell, led by the Right, monsters like Howard, Abbott, Morrison et al, and the complicity of the zombie remnants of the ALP, now the Another Liberal Party.
All driven by the Murdoch cancer.
Now the place is locked in a suicidal frenzy of treacherous and deeply racist Sinophobia, after decades when China did us NOTHING but good. Such duplicity is bound to get its just desserts-and soon.
The Thai jail is not a place I’d want to return to.
I was new so I had to sleep with my head directly next to the open toilet in the corner, my head getting kicked every time someone went to shit in the middle of the night.
I did meet a lot of nice Burmese guys in there, who insisted on sharing every single meal they had with me.
They taught me how to sleep with a water bottle under your neck, as it helps your posture on the concrete floor.
There was a Dutch man who’d killed his Thai wife.
A few Americans and Australians recently nabbed on drug charges. Lots of Iranian guys. They were the most aggressive towards Americans.
The common theme from everyone was, ‘I was set up’. I began to doubt my own story.
Fast forward a few weeks later.
I am out on some sort of conditional release.
They have both passports this time. I have to check in every week to a ‘parole’ office and wait for my official trial date which is set 4 or 5 months in the future.
I can’t leave Thailand.
Radicalcenter says:
Sweet numbers, brah. But that works only if you can avoid spending all the profit on the next, also wildly appreciated house, right?
One can do this by moving to a house that is smaller, older, or in a less desirable climate or location, of course. That isn’t a good option for everyone, though, especially families. We have a number of children, so we need to move someplace bigger, not smaller.
Once past that stage of life, yeah, it’s usually feasible to downsize and come out ahead that way on housing costs and equity: i.e., sell a big house and buy a smaller house. That way you come ahead even if you stay in the same locale, saving/investing some of the proceeds and/or having a lower monthly mortgage payment.
Also, those inland “flight” / retirement areas aren’t so cheap anymore.
One used to profit from expensive coastal and/or big-city home sales and buy really cheap inland. But this is changing fast. Primarily due to the acceleration of decent people fleeing even mid-sized cities (not just NY, LA, Chicago, Houston), and millions working mostly online for the first time.
Home prices continue to rise far faster than our salaries/wages in booming country & exurban counties across Utah, Nevada, Texas, Florida, eastern OR and WA, Montana, Wyoming, etc.
My mother is selling her house in a fairly expensive part of NJ and buying out West. The prices for the newer houses far from any city in Utah or Nevada, are shockingly higher than when we started looking in earnest less than two hears ago. We thought we were savvy and sufficiently apprised of costs in these boom-towns, but nope.
In the two inland flight areas we’re looking at, newer-home prices are going up maybe 4x faster than my Mom’s house. Houses we thought might cost $300,000 are surging to $400,000 and $500,000. If we thought she might pick up a house with a certain amount of property for $400,000, it’s now $600,000 to $800,000.
As for California real estate, man, you killed it!
I’m happy for you. I too would have bought when you did if we had lived in Cali then. We’d try to buy in SoCal even now, as overpriced and overcrowded as it is, if we weren’t raising children. But we won’t subject our kids to the California curriculum much longer — it’s getting more extreme by the month. Nor will we live in a jurisdiction with “vaccine” “passports”, which may be on their way here. In the new lockdown America, even the prospect of real estate profits isn’t enough to keep families in certain places long-term, like California.
Also, how are young Americans to buy real estate to raise their own families? The artificially low interest rates won’t last. And even rock-bottom rates don’t help if you can’t come up with a down-payment. A 20% down-payment could easily be $70-80,000 or more in many areas with good jobs. Many, probably most, Americans don’t inherit a house. Given the number of children we have, ours won’t each inherit a house either. How do they ever get on this absurd merry-go-round?
When home prices consistently riser faster than salaries and wages, this cannot serve most people well in the long run. You made out very well, and we may do alright, but this system already hurts more people than it helps, and it cannot go on forever.
And before you ask, no, the embassy does nothing.
You’ve watched too many television dramas. They only intervene in capital crimes or a crime that makes the US look bad.
While I was in the jail, they told me to hang tight and let them know if I was being mistreated.
When I got out they gave me a list of lawyers.
I picked the one who bragged to me that ‘Her husband was a high up police officer’. In any other country, this would have been a warning sign, but I figured in Thailand, it was a golden ticket.
I hang out in Thailand for a while.
Avoiding scooters and bars. freaking out, obviously, but pretty powerless.
No amount of American money could help me at that point. The government didn’t care.
The “trial” was bizarre.
No visitors are allowed. The courtroom I was in was underground. You’re brought to a jail before the trial where you have to take off your shoes and belt and then stand in a cage inside the trial room.
I was with three other guys in the cage.
There’s no one in the courtroom aside from some grim-looking guard with a rifle.
Jeff Stryker says:
An Expert Speaks
[1] You can stagger around drunk & be puking on yourself in Siam & nobody will care a whit.
[2] However, you can stone cold sober & drive & if you get into an accident…you are in trouble.
[3] Generally, you can buy yourself out of any reasonable situation for a few grand. You really should not be traveling in SEA if you don’t have $3000 spare cash in the event of a serious situation.
[4] It would be typical of an American new comer to believe that Americans are not detested overseas & that being American will mean jack in SEA. Canadian? Maybe a little respect. British? Okay. American? Zero. The USA is regarded as the worst Superpower that ever existed & the average white American is regarded as a loudmouthed hick & ignorant too boot. However, in Siam, generally Thais don’t care.
[5] If you get locked in jail its the other American-hating nationals like Iranians, of whom there are a considerable number, or even Pakistanis who will threaten you for political reasons. Thais do not care. For that matter, even some Aussies or Brits are anti-American to come at you in an Immigration jail.
[6] Doing drugs is a tricky business. If you have to do drugs, score from ladyboys or from hotel staff of a younger hipper variety who themselves smoke weed. You can buy your way out of a weed bust, but Ya Ba & Meth are going to get you time. If you deal drugs or try to smuggle them in Pattaya or Bangkok, you are so stupid you should commit suicide when you get busted. Which you will be. Scoring drugs randomly on the street will always be a set up. With Tuk Tuk drivers or taxi drivers who ask you if you want to purchase drugs it will be a set up. You can score in Sukhumivit around Soi 4 from the Africans but they are periodically hit for raids.
[7] Many bar girls or hookers are meth addicts.
[8] An American married to Issan girl who does not know these ropes is not very bright.
[9] Make one or two semi-important friends.
[10] Remember the property laws. They are not in your favor. Property belongs to your wife.
Many posters here are naive hicks who have no business being outside the small city or town they were born. Some hicks are scammed in SEA.
After an hour of waiting, a prim little woman walks in, sits down at a table facing the cage.
She calls out your name and you walk to the front of the cage.
She reads your file out loud: the charges, I guess. It’s all in Thai.
My lawyer is then allowed to enter the room.
They talk quietly for a few minutes in Thai.
She’s very deferential, not making eye contact with the judge.
The lawyer then approaches the cage and asks if I am sorry.
I’m ready: I know this is my cue to turn on the histrionics.
I bow and wai repeatedly at the judge, the guards, the other Thais in the cage.
My lawyer had prepared me.
I repeat the Thai phrase I had prepared, over and over again and again. “I am so sorry and ashamed. I am so sorry and ashamed.” Likely mangling the pronunciation.
I cry. I plead.
The judge looks at the lawyer. Laughs.
Scribbles something on the file and then proclaims something in Thai. Before the lawyer has a chance to translate, I’m taken by a guard from the cage back to the primary jail in the courthouse.
I sit there for two hours.
Eventually, they call my name and my lawyer is at the jail door.
She’s smiling.
If you’re interested, my total penalty was…wait for it…a 100,000 baht fine paid to the court and an agreement to ‘not do anything bad in Thailand’ for one full year.
Emslander says:
Your experience with the Thai legal system is fairly typical of experiences with any legal system anywhere. I have drilled it into my sons’ heads from birth to NEVER get involved with the police other than to say “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.” I told them that, if they wanted bad attention or to be punished, to just come home and I’d accommodate. They mostly complied. The deeper you get into any sort of trouble, the more it will cost you in time, money and degradation.
I pay my lawyer another 100,000 baht, wait to get my 100,000 baht bond back from the courthouse (which has to be fronted by a Thai…in this case, my lawyer), and I am on my way.
I fly to KL that night.
I bear no ill will towards the Thai people.
I made a stupid mistake and, in retrospect, should have paid the fine upfront. Scam or no scam.
The normal Thai people live in a shitty, corrupt system. They’re just trying to get by. At least they have the comforts of family, community, culture, and tradition to return to after a long day of sentencing Americans to prison.
Disclaimer says:
In response to a comment by @obwandiyag who said
“…Wait till he needs a doctor…”
The medical care in most of the world is far better than in the US. Its not even close. US is ranked 37th (and dropping) on quality of medical care which is basically dead last in the first world.
US medical care was the best in the world until around 1975 or so since then its been steadily downhill.
To answer your earlier question, I think most of the white nationalists are the disgusting pigs. Potato-shaped genetic-mutt trash dropping rancor and CheezeIt crumbs all over their cum-stained keyboards.
There is no hope for the United States if these guys are the vanguards of “our” future. I’ll take the “Orientals” or the Muslims any day of the week.
Europe is a weird case.
As a political or economic union it’s toast, but the individual states will still have a lot of interesting possibilities. In many ways, Europe’s inevitable dissolution is good for guys like me.
It will be easier to get in and purchase citizenship, or property, or whatever. The fragmentation of Europe will be a boon for those fleeing the West.
The ‘least developed’ European countries have the most interesting long-term prospects, at least as places I like to live. I’d look for those that are food-secure and have good access to clean water.
john cronk says:
I find the guy’s life as described to be mis-spent, randomly purposeless and morally bankrupt. He may as well have been an ant or a fly. However, the subject of escaping the deteriorating West is a salient one and I’m interested in how it can be done in a sensible, considered, and productive way.
There are some nice towns in Bulgaria (mostly in the Rhodope foothills) and Albania that I’d consider long-term. Portugal was great until the Golden Visa, and will now be flooded with Brits heading back to Spain or Chinese opportunists.
I’ve always been a fan of Poland, of Polish cities and people. Georgia and Abkhazia are gorgeous and ripe for sustainable development–whatever that means.
Northern Spain, west of Basque country, towards Galacia, is gorgeous and peaceful. There are some great small towns in Slovakia but you have to be ready to handle Gypsies. Northwestern Greece, in the mountains, has a great climate and food culture. No one will bug you there.
There’s also East Asia, but that’s a whole other article.
Reading about your adventures everywhere, some readers might think you’re just an anchorless hedonist, but you’re actually happily married, and your wife does travel with you. Since it’s nearly impossible to synchronize wishes or demands on the road, this is very rare. You’re very lucky. To wrap up, do you have advice for Americans who might want to get out?
Yes, for much of the past 5 years of non-stop travel my wife has been by my side. It’s been pretty amazing and I am incredibly fortunate to have someone so willing to be ‘unsettled’ throughout the world.
It’s always fun to travel alone but having someone to wake up and make breakfast for–no matter the weird city we’re in–is pure pleasure.
For those looking to escape, my advice would be to have a plan but not to commit to it too firmly.
Too many people over-utilize the Internet to the detriment of on-the-ground intelligence.
I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who’ve ‘sold everything’ back in the States and then bought a one-way ticket to Fethiye or Chiang Mai without ever visiting these places once! All based on some Youtuber’s drone videos.
It’s ridiculous.
These are, unsurprisingly, the people that go back to Michigan in a few years.
Once travel opens back up, get your money right in the US first. Don’t burn bridges.
Then, pick a region.
Pack minimally.
I recommend warmer countries first simply because there’s less to pack. Don’t worry about booking an apartment for a month. Book a few days on Airbnb. Move around to a different neighborhood. In a city like Jakarta or Yangon or even Milan, you can have a dramatically different experience based on your neighborhood.
Keep in mind, no matter where you travel, you’ll always bring yourself along. If you aren’t happy in your own head, in your own body, then no amount of wandering will change that.
Jonathan (41-years-old)
cohen says:
Linh
You are doing a good job to some degree in telling the audience the real interesting and historical stuff about counties you travel to.. unlike you, when I travel I don't talk to “intellectuals”.
I to go to small cafes and talk to locals who don't speak a word of English but somehow there is always a one eyed men among blinds, one who wants to speak and brush up his English with in the crowd. To me that is fun.
The most common bonding is the sense of humor and bonding through jokes. That is something so common among people of various background. Try that experience next time.
Your stories about Serbia, and Lebanon did lack information. For instance, in Belgrade the American bombing or missiles attack were incredibly precise and ironically US got away bombing the Chinese Embassy by claiming an error. No way Jose. The defense ministry building destroyed were among big building and in front of each. There was no damage to any neighboring buildings.
Philip Morris bought the Serbian Cigarette company for one dollar? and the Yugo (bad or good beside the point) car company was sold to an American car company for 1 dollar. There are three KPMG offices in Belgrade. Why an American company needs 3 offices in the same city. Privatization my man.
You are hung up on Albania. Did you see the digging of an old gladiator arena by the sea? Or their political parties. People like me care less about the nice pictures of food from a restaurant menu. At least I for one.
Go to Jakarta, or Casablanca and see Muslim women with their Hijab driving taxi without fear of any physical harm. You can not imagine that happening in America, This is information and not pictures of food which is very subjective. Try to go to Tangier in Morocco and get a taste of Europe and Africa in one place. And the weather one has to experience it oneself. Daniel Craig has a house in Tangier on the Atlantic side (lot of French artists, mostly fags).
Talk to a native Jews of Casablanca and learn why on earth they don't want to go to their “promised homeland”. The answer would surprise you. I was amused when one of them in a synagogue said “Then what the hell we will be doing there once we get to Israel”.
Try some volcanic islands in Indonesia where Comodo dragons still roam. Or Lake Biakal. Very different than the food information with prices.
Put some information in your writing that would be worth reading. Food? Who gives a sh… We have the tendency to talk about foreign foods and feel cultured and well informed.
Or at least that HIS opinion.
I liked the story. Seems like this fellow was in the right place, at the right time, and husbanded his money well. Good for him. My life has been one scramble after the other, with no time to take a breather.
Americans have a lot of issues they need to sort out before they go elsewhere. One of which is the hooks and claws that “Uncle Sam” has in just about everything you do. And another thing is the bad Intel that you have. You are better off living under a mattress for the last forty years than listen to anything available off the internet.
The Ugly American
All of this reminds me of an old movie titled “The Ugly American”.
An intelligent, articulate scholar, Harrison MacWhite, survives a hostile Senate confirmation hearing at the hands of conservatives to become ambassador to Sarkan. Sarkan is a southeast Asian country where civil war threatens a tense peace.
Despite his knowledge, once he’s there, MacWhite sees only a dichotomy between the U.S. and Communism.
He can’t accept that anti-American sentiment might be a longing for self-determination and nationalism.
Imagine that!
This 1963 MARLON BRANDO film ' The UGLY AMERICAN ' is an all too often overlooked effort from such a truly talented actor as was Mr. Brando. Relevant upon release 53 years ago, it is relevant today. The AIRPORT ARRIVAL scenes as Ambassador MacWhite speeds off in his 1957 Cadillac Fleetwood limousine are a CINEMATIC TRIUMPH alone !
-Robert D.
Over the years, the term “the ugly American” has come to describe a pompus know-it all attitude that is dismissive of others, and that basks in the tattered remains of American patriotism.
The big problem with expatriation is the IRS. If you renounce your citizenship you are treated as though you have sold all your assets at fair market value, and must pay tax accordingly. If you don’t do that, you can simply live abroad and keep your US citizenship (and hopefully your new country allows dual citizenship). You will still have to file US tax returns and pay US taxes, although you will get a credit against it for any foreign taxes paid.
-Hapalong Cassidy
I found this review of the movie enlightening.
Viet Nam 1963
I was in Viet Nam from June 1963 to March 1964. We saw “The Ugly American” at the American movie theatre in Saigon, the Capitol Kinh Do.
There were many Americans and their dependents in Saigon and in Viet Nam at this time–most were isolated with cocktail parties, teas, and American activities. Most American children went to the American Community School outside of Tan Son Nhut Air Base. Their parents belonged to the exclusive Cercle Sportiff, hobnobbing with the Vietnamese elite who monetarily benefited from the war. There were opportunities for American civilians to teach the Vietnamese English, but I never knew of any opportunities for Americans to learn Vietnamese or national customs.
Many of the children of the diplomatic corps were instructed that if their shirt tails hung out or if they ate with their fingers when eating implements were available, they would be considered “ugly Americans.” Nothing was said about the teenage boys drinking, whoring, and racing their motorcycles through the darkened Saigon streets in the early morning hours. Nothing was said about how we knew the way to “win” the war against the popular nationalist freedom fighter known as Ho Chi Minh who organized the successful campaigns against the Japanese and French occupiers.
Perhaps if we had listened a little more, learned the language and customs, and understood that the desire for national freedom is not communism, we wouldn’t still be trying to “win” the Vietnam War.
…
I’m an American myself. So what is the deal?
Hum.
Not nearly good enough.
What is “it” with Americans?
I’m an American. So what’s the deal, eh?
America soon.
Why do we want to leave the “home of the free”, and “the shining house on the hill”, where the entire world wants to move to? Are we stupid? Are we too full of ourselves?
The U.S. government doesn’t formally track how many Americans leave the U.S. but the most recent estimate puts the figure at nearly nine million. This figure represents a doubling of the 1999 figure, placed at 4.1 million. The number of expats has more than doubled in the last fifteen years — a number growing faster than the rate of the U.S. population itself.
Juan jwayne says:
I live in Nicaragua/ Costa Rica. My $ goes much farther. The people are poor but happy,happier than Americans.You must have an income, me, union pension. My Atm card works here,so no worries.Takes a lil while to get used to it, different culture, but you’re easy going about things, it’ll work out. Good Luck
steinbergfeldwitzcohen says:
I would think that a smart guy would have learned something about the culture of THAILAND before he went there! You can go to jail for being disrespectful to their Royals.
Never, ever show anger.
Never: it is disrespectful and shows weakness (an inability to control emotions or to be properly afraid of those with the power of life and death, ie. 3rd world cops).
In fact, treat every cop and govt official as a long missed uncle you deeply love and respect. If you do that you cannot lose in the game.
You could have walked out of that station in 1 hr or less by being respectful and calm, wishing to pay while indicating a recent family hardship of a medical nature or, even better, allude to a recent family death that you had to cover the funeral costs for as you are the eldest.
The cops and robbers would have settled for 50% and you would have left happy.
After fifteen months of travel, I returned to the United States ready to give American life another try. After a few months at home with my family, I moved back to San Francisco, the city I lived and worked in before traveling. I started looking for a job, looking for apartments, looking for new friends. I felt eager to re-enter American society, and pick up somewhat where I left off.
Within four months, I had changed my mind.
After struggling with so many aspects of United States society and culture, I ended up finding a pretty great life in Cape Town, South Africa (along with a pretty great American boyfriend who had moved here years ago and found the same). I spent much of last year, hopping back and forth between the two countries, allowing me to distinctly see the differences between them. I moved here officially this past July.
A new survey shows I’m not alone: according to a TransferWise national survey of over 2000 adults, around one in three Americans say they’d consider leaving the United States for another country.
For us millennials, it’s even worse: 55% of Americans between the ages of 18-34 say they’d consider it.
What scares me most is that I won’t be able to enjoy life as I do here if I were to move back to the United States. Though life in South Africa comes with its own unique set of struggles, my life here in many ways became far easier than what I experienced in the States.
Here’s how:
1. I don’t have to worry about getting sick.
In the Transferwise Survey, “more affordable healthcare” was the number one improvement respondents said would make living in the US more appealing.
For years, the US has had the most expensive yet least effective healthcare system in the world. The recent drug price-hike scandal reminded us that unlike Canada, Australia, and many countries in Europe, our country does not regulate drug prices in the same way we regulate other basic needs, like water and electricity. Instead, we are the only developed nation that allows drug makers to set their own prices, regardless of whether average Americans can afford it.
America today.
As a freelancer, healthcare became one of my top priorities when deciding where to live. Individual plans in New York city can go up to a grand a month. And in my homestate of Florida, the limited access to affordable women’s health needs like pap smears, yearly gynocologist visits, and affordable birth control became a large part of why I left. Planned Parenthood was few and far between in Florida, and charged comparatively high rates after losing funding from the state government. The St. Petersburg Times reported that in 2001, presidential candidate Jeb Bush cut over $300,000 for family planning services through Planned Parenthood. The result? In 2014, an evaluation of health data found that Florida was tied with Oklahoma and Arkansas for the worst state for women’s health.
2. “Work-life balance” actually seems possible.
In the Transferwise survey, “a better quality of life” was the most popular reason people chose to consider leaving the country. It was top on my list too.
I enjoy living in places that prioritize joy instead of only productivity.
In South Africa, I saw people both engaging in meaningful work, and enjoying their weekends. I saw workers consider their loved ones and their overall well-being in their work decisions, without feeling guilty or selfish.
And, I’ve seen people with the most opportunity for financial gain simply choose not to capitalize on it. My boyfriend once asked the owner of a coffee shop we often visited why she closed on Saturdays and Sundays, and so early during the week. He explained to her she could make a killing with brunches on Saturday.
She shrugged her shoulders and told him she already knew that.
But she said she’d rather be with her family on Saturdays than have to worry about work. Similarly, I’ve seen some wine bars close Friday at 10pm, at the time they’d perhaps be most profitable.
I prefer this kind of prioritizing.
3. As a person of color, being an “expat” instead of a “minority” is kind of relieving.
Many articles have discussed how a person of color from the US can often receive more privileges abroad than in the United States.
In his New York Times article “The Next Great Migration” Thomas Chatterton Williams describes the story of his friend who moved from New York to London:
“He confessed, ‘The race situation back home occupies so much space in your mind, even just safety-wise, I actually never fully understood what it meant to be American, and all the advantages that come with it, until now…
You immediately remove that affirmative action target from your back.
A work visa gives you the validation that you’re good at what you do.”
In South Africa, I’ve had similar experiences. Instead of being the “affirmative action kid” I was often labeled at college, here my achievements are never tied to my racial background. People care far more about my US college degree and work experience than how I racially identify.
And because my racial background doesn’t matter nearly as much, race no longer has to matter as much in my life.
My primary identity in South Africa is “American” in a way it never was back in the States. After years of trying to figure out my how my Latino identity fits among my life, it’s kind of relieving for once to live in a place where frankly, no one gives a shit.
4. My values as a global citizen are affirmed.
Life in the United States is generally only about the United States. This is reflected in everything from American travel habits to American media to American curriculum in schools.
But life in other countries is about the world.
For example, Business Insider ran a story that illustrated the differences between US media and media internationally. They put side-to-side the cover stories for Time magazine’s US edition versus its editions abroad.
One month, the cover in the US had the headline “Chore Wars”, while the rest of the world got “Travels Through Islam.” Another month, while the rest of the world had a front page story on rebellion in the Middle East, the US got “Why Anxiety is Good For You.”
Statistics back up this apparent lack of interest in the rest of the world: a State of the Media survey found that in 2008, news agencies in the US devoted only 10.3% to foreign coverage.
While watching the news in South Africa, I also noticed that how we present international coverage also makes a difference. When watching coverage of developments in Iraq and Syria, newscasters actually interviewed Iraqis and Syrians.
I realized that this was perhaps the first time I had ever seen an Iraqi or Syrian civilian given substantial time on television to tell their story. In the US, though civilians from these areas were covered briefly in video footage, I never saw them personally asked for their opinion.
In some ways you could argue that our media is just catering to what Americans truly want to know– which unfortunately, seems to be only about ourselves. People from the US generally don’t have an interest in what happens internationally.
In 2013, The Daily Mail reported that in a survey of over 2,000 Americans, almost half of respondents who had never been abroad said that the only things worth seeing were in our own country. Almost a third answered that even if they had the money, they’d prefer to travel to local areas.
I know I want to live in a place where citizens and institutions care about the world around them and have a natural curiosity for learning about others. Unfortunately, it seems more difficult to find that in the States.
I’m not sure if I’ll live abroad forever, or if these four priorities will be my same priorities in the future. But for now, the US will have to put up a far better show to convince me it’s worth going “home.”
The Alarmist says:
When I was still military, in a so-called “friendly” country, one of my buddies decided our cab fare to town was too much … it was about $1 too much … BFD or Biloxi Fire Department, as we used to say … anyway, buddy decides to pay what he thinks is fair and walk away, so cabbie says, “No good… we go to police!” So buddy says, “Ok, we go to police.” I say, “You know the police beat people in this country, right?” and hand the cabbie the rest of the fare, figuring I was feeding one of his rugrats. When you are an American abroad, you have far fewer friends than you think, and they certainly don’t include the authorities … their and ours.
America soon.
So I am going to kind of throw some shit to America right now…
6 Uncomfortable truths about life in the United States
1. The only country that incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than the U.S. is North Korea.
The International Centre for Prison Studies estimates that we have more than 2.2 million people behind bars, or around 716 people per 100,000 citizens, which is far higher than Russia, China, and Iran. To put this in even more perspective, the number per 100,000 citizens in European countries: 78 in Germany, 103 in France, and 99 in Italy. Even worse, 60% of U.S. prisoners are non-violent offenders. The numbers demonstrate how the United States contributes a completely disproportional amount of prisoners to the global environment: we are responsible for around 22% of the total amount of inmates in the world, even though we only account for 4.4% of the world population.
2. Though we spend more money on health care than any other country in the world, our life expectancy in some areas of the South is lower than the life expectancy in Nicaragua, Algeria and Bangladesh.
Though our life expectancy overall has improved (Americans live around eight years longer now than they did in 1970), our rate of improvement is far slower than other countries, and in some counties is on-par with countries far less developed than we are. We also rank last among rich countries in overall health performance, according to a 2014 survey by the Commonwealth Fund that looked at measures like equity of care and efficiency.
This suggests that Americans overspend on technology, without achieving higher results. For example, Americans have the highest rate of MRI exams. And yet in Austria, where the MRI exam rate is around half of ours, the life expectancy is still two years longer than ours.
We also rank low among developed nations for the amount of doctors we have: only 2.5 per 1,000 people (in 2005). In most of Europe, that number is far above three. In Cuba it was 6.7 in 2010. A 2015 report suggested that by 2025 our country would need between 46,000 and 90,000 more physicians than we have today.
3. Out of all developed nations, we have the highest teen pregnancy rate.
The Guttmacher Institute found that the pregnancy rate for American girls is 57 out of every 1,000 girls, far higher than most developed countries. Many argue that this derives from the failure of our abstinence-only education programs. The majority of European countries use comprehensive sex-ed. The result? A teen pregnancy rate of 5.3 per 1,000 in the Netherlands, 4.3 per 1,000 in Switzerland and 9.8 per 1,000 in Germany.
…one-third of the world’s paper and around a quarter of the world’s oil, coal and aluminum.
5. We are the only developed country that still executes prisoners.
111 UN member nations have expressed their agreement with a moratorium on the death penalty. And yet the US stands alone among developing countries in continuing the practice.
We can’t argue that we’ve kept the death penalty because it works: several articles have shown how capital punishment in the U.S. has been significantly racist, economically costly, and ultimately inefffective in deterring future crime.
6. We are one of only three nations in the world that does not guarantee paid maternal leave.
Though 70 percent of children live in families where both adults work, the United States still has made little effort to provide paid maternal leave for American families.
The small company we keep? Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.
A 2010 survey found that 76 of registered voters supported some form of paid leave.
Other studies also show that when maternity leaves are short and unpaid, immunization and health visit rates go down and infant mortality rates go up. An OECD study on nineteen countries from 1979 to 2003 also found that paid parental led to significantly greater productivity.
So what is the point in all of this?
Life is what you make of it.
Do not live your life in fear.
Just because you were born in the United States, and was raised as an American with all the baggage and advantages that comes with it, you can change the script.
Forest Gump says that “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get”. I argue that you can change the box.
And who cares why?
Really!
If you want to be a hedonistic slime-ball or, a forever-back-packer, or settle down with a family somewhere else. It is no one else’s business. It’s only yours.
So when I read the comments here, I see the arrogance of self-righteous American calling others out for doing things that they themselves are far too afraid to do.
It is really quite simple, really.
You migrate to where your happiness can manifest and become reality. That chick that I mentioned above was far happier in South Africa than in the States. And I am not doubting her. the things that matter to her are important. You just don’t brush them off to the side and call her a “coward” or a “traitor”. Do you?
If you are happy were you are now, then stay there.
I do miss many things about the United States, but for me personally it is literally a prison as a third-rate citizen.No matter what aspects that I miss, that I long for, and what fond memories that I have, I know that they are just that; memories.
We have to look at what is important to us all, and use faith, prayer and affirmation campaigns to make it manifest.
With a plan, backed up with action, understanding and wisdom, you will be able to manifest your desires
May your life become the source for your greatest happiness.
May your life become the source for your greatest happiness.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my index about Escape! (from America)
All through our lives we have been told that “news” provides us with a “window to the world”, and that we need to keep abreast of the events of the day. The argument is that this is how we grow, learn and understand our place in society.
This, now more than ever, is absolutely false.
And as I have repeatedly tried to explain this to you all, you all still don’t FUCKING GET IT!
(Sorry for being so brash and in your face, but Jeeze! Louise!)
All, yes all and every, item of “news” that comes out of the United States is manipulative propaganda. That’s what it is, that’s all it is, and if you respond that you have something that you read from this alternative news source… I will have to shake my head in sadness and disbelief.
There is no longer any free, independent “news” out of the United States today. It is all a very well-honed network of manipulation and deceit.
This means ALL OF IT.
Key Points
Point One. All “news” manipulates.
If you want to get a full perspective on something then you need to get a wide selection of information from many sources. And NO I DO NOT MEAN AMERICAN SOURCES. I mean international sources.
This is key point Two.
Oh, Mr. So-and-so wrote a "well researched" book on China. Great.
Did he write on his experiences inside of China?
No.
Why not?
He used many well documented sources.
Well, what were his sources?
Oh! All American publications, written in English, by people who have never been to China regurgitating what they have read.
And how is the opinion, of a person, who forms his opinions, by other opinionated people who know absolutely nothing about China going to improve your life?
It isn’t.
Instead, you should use that money and you buy a plane ticket and you look around yourself.
That’s key point Three. See what is important with your own two eyes, using your ears, on the ground and touching things with your hands. Books and periodicals and articles are so deceptive these days that they are more of a hindrance to the truth than information.
Now, the world has many many, MANY people pretending to be journalists.
Thus, you have to take each and every “report” and “news article” cautiously (in America we call this “with a grain of salt“). You can read it as most articles are really nothing more than opinions, NOT reporting, and some of those opinions have some value.
I think the most important key point is four. There is no longer any actual reporting inside of America today.
Zero.
Reporting of events in America has been replaced by carefully constructed narratives used to manipulate American citizens to follow herd behaviors.
One of the most important things that we must understand is that America has constructed the most powerful and elaborate propaganda network in history.
The American (levers of government) owns, through proxy, all of the major media, and all of the alternative media.
Yes, please read that again.
The American government owned Rush Limbaugh. The American government owns Free Republic. The American government supports GAB, the American government promotes Salon, the American government is the voice of the Huffington Post. The American government injects Zero Hedge. The American government controls the narratives on LinkedIN.
Those beloved Conservatives, and those funny progressives are all tools for the government. ALL OF THEM.
Thus key point five; actual events (and truths) are hidden from Americans.
So what is the purpose of “news” manipulation?
The actual purpose brings us to key Six. It is more than just a distraction. It’s a “snipe hunt”. The purpose of American news is to keep the American people ignorant.
It is to keep Americans away from the truths.
It is to keep Americans ignorant of the real situations.
This is because if they realized what they were, they would be extremely angry; angry to a point of killing everyone on sight in rolling fits of rage.
That’s why.
SNIPE HUNT
A snipe huntisa type of practical joke or fool's errand, in existence in North America as early as the 1840s, in which an unsuspecting newcomeris duped into trying to catch a nonexistent animal called a snipe. Although snipe are an actual family of birds, a snipehunt is a quest for an imaginarycreaturewhosedescriptionvaries.
-Wikipedia
Those of us “in the know” only have clarity on small tidbits of Intel. However, when we start linking up with others (such as through MM, here) who also have their information and we start putting the information together a very… very… VERY disturbing picture comes to light.
Which is point Seven. The actual reality of how Americans are, the lives they live, and the operation of the government is so far distanced from that which is promoted by the media that it resembles something completely different.
Indeed, the true reality of what America is really resembles the movie the Matrix where young Neo is exposed to the truth of what the world actually looks like.
Central to the philosophical edge of The Matrix is the red and blue pill scene. Morpheus, a human awakened to mankind’s reality, offers the same enlightenment to Neo, who is still plugged into an illusion. Alas, the choice must be Neo’s alone and to this end, Morpheus presents him with a metaphorical choice between two brightly colored pills. Take the red variety, and Neo will be unplugged, finally capable of seeing the world for what it really is. Swallow the blue pill, however, and Neo will not only go back to his digital, make-believe existence, but he’ll also forget ever having questioned what is real and what could be a lie.
Thus point eight. America is not a “shining city on the hill” with “democracy” and “freedom”, with a nation ruled by “justice”.
America is instead, an [1] oligarchy-owned Corporatocracy.
It is one that [2] operates as a military empire, and budgets it appropriately.
America [3] treats it’s people as disposable debit-serfs for profit, with a million tiny “hands in the wallet” with thousands (no longer hundreds) of taxes, fees, rules, and requirements that siphon money away from the citizenry in every shape, and in every form.
And America [4] engages on the international scene as a war-mongering bully, and is [5] presently a serious threat to the future of mankind.
Like a cancer the sicknesses that the leadership has permitted to grow has festered until now, the cancer has metastasized. America has become a dangerous monster that is thrashing around angerly, and trying to maintain it’s respect, it’s authority, and it’s world position. It cannot do that, and of which, it is quite dangerous.
But we are not going to talk about that.
Instead we are going to get back to the point that American “news” is a SNIPE HUNT of misdirection to keep Americans going around and around, and around, and around in circles.
American “news” as a “snipe hunt”
To illustrate how Americans are manipulated to go after “snipes” on a “snipe hunt” we will use the 2009 movie “Push” to illustrate this point.
What is real and what is an illusion when someone else controls your eyes and your memories?
Really.
What if everything that you know is an artificial construct that you now believe and that the truth was erased and false memories were implanted in your brain? Could you tell the difference?
I argue you cannot.
And just like many Americans “had a bad experience with Huawei”, who never owned a Huawei phone…
Who swear that they are never going “to use 5G”…
And now “will not get their RNA vaccination”…
… is no different than you remembering a brother that never existed.
The movie “Push” 2009
As that was one of the scenes in this movie. I am going to use this movie as the basis of discussion on the idea that other forces are so powerful that they can change what you think, what you believe, what you remember, and thus control how you act.
Push 2009.
This movie is sort of a “sleeper” movie about people with super-powers. But unlike that same-old nonsense about being bitten by radioactive spiders and the like, this one discusses …
These days you can't throw a half-brick in the air without it landing on someone who can fly, or was bitten by a radioactive spider (and that's assuming that the 'half-brick' in question doesn't GIVE the person it lands on the power to fly or climb walls!).
However, back in 2009, superhero movies (or those generally showing young, good-looking people with superpowers) weren't quite always guaranteed to make as much money as today's average Marvel Cinematic Universe film.
Therefore, 'Push' sort of flew below radar at the time.
I'd like to say that it's achieved a 'cult following' over time and it's a bit more of a 'sleeper hit,' however, it seems to have been completely forgotten. And, in my opinion, that's a shame - I really enjoyed it!
-bowmanblue
The movie start out with a narrator describing how those with “abilities” have been involved with the US government since 1945.
These abilities are various flavors of telekinetic powers. Some can push thoughts into other people’s brains, others can see into the future, and some can kill others by thoughts alone.
Two of the people with these special “abilities” or “powers”, are known as “movers”.
Movers
Movers are powerful telekinetics who are trained to identify the specific atomic frequency of a given material and alter the gravitational field around it, usually causing the nearby air to appear warped.
This allows them to move both animate and inanimate objects.
Advanced Movers can work at the molecular level, creating protective force fields in the air around them or to reinforce punches and other strikes to make them stronger.
A “mover” can move things with their mind.
Two “Movers”, Nick Gant and his father, are on the run from the “Division”. Which is a waved, unacknowledged special access program in the United States government W(U)-SAP.
Realizing that escape is impossible, Nick’s father tells him of a vision he received from a “Watcher”.
Watchers
Watchers have the ability to foresee the future to varying degrees.
As knowledge of the future invariably causes that future to change, Watchers' visions of the future in their direct sphere of influence are subject to frequent shifting.
This is another type of person who's telekinetic powers involve the power to see the future.
This, in this case, a girl will give him a flower and he is to do whatever she says in order to "save us all."
A “watcher” can see into the future.
Nick’s father throws Nick into an air vent as Agent Henry Carver of the Division arrives. Nick sees his father get killed before escaping.
A decade later, the American Division tests an augmentation drug on a “Pusher”, named Kira.
Pushers
Pushers have the ability to implant memories, thoughts and emotions into the minds of other people in order to manipulate them.
The skill level of the Pusher determines how many people the Pusher is able to control at one time, and how vivid the implanted memories are.
A powerful Pusher can push a large group of people at the same time, basically creating a personal army.
A Pusher is able to make a person do anything the Pusher desires, even commit suicide.
A Pusher's eyes indicate how powerful they are: their pupils will dilate to certain degrees depending on how powerful the push is (for example, Henry Carver's eyes are rendered completely black, signifying that he is an extremely able and effective Pusher).
A “pusher” can put thoughts in your head, and change your memories.
This drug either kills the host or greatly increases their powers exponentially.
The test works after many tries.
Rendering the doctor unconscious, Kira steals his security clearance card and an augmentation drug-filled syringe and escapes.
In Hong Kong, Nick (now older as a young man) is hiding from the Division as an expatriate.
He attempts to use his ability to make a living, but his poor skills at “moving” at a dice game leave him indebted to a local Triad. Which for you all who do not know, is the name of a Chinese criminal organization.
This particular Triad is controlled by “Bleeders”, bred by the now-defunct Chinese Division.
In the movie, the Chinese tried to make their own version of the American “division” but failed. The remnants were either absorbed by the American organization or went “underground” and became criminal syndicates.
Bleeder
Bleeders have the ability to emit high-pitched sonic vibrations that cause ruptures in a target's blood vessels.
While using this ability, their eyes turn into slits because of synthetic materials implanted in them to protect the blood vessels from the effects of their own ability.
They are also sometimes known as Joe Mama.
Bleeders can kill you.
A young girl named Cassie Holmes arrives at Nick’s apartment.
She explains to him that she is a “Watcher”.
Watchers
Watchers have the ability to foresee the future to varying degrees.
As knowledge of the future invariably causes that future to change, Watchers' visions of the future in their direct sphere of influence are subject to frequent shifting.
She further explains that they are going to find a case containing 6 million dollars. But shortly afterwards, they are attacked by Triad Bleeders but escape.
All of the reviews I've read of this movie have savaged it and, personally, I didn't think it was nearly bad as bad as all that.
There were some interesting characters (the guy they enlist to help them hide themselves from the bad guys comes to mind here), and it put a new and interesting spin on the whole "people with super powers" genre.
BUT...what really makes me love this film is the depictions of Hong Kong.
See, I have been living in Hong Kong for almost 5 years now and I've told all my friends and family that if they want to get a good look at the many sides of the city (other than the touristy facade is typically presented), watch this movie.
The film makers really did a great job of capturing what it's like to wander around Hong Kong, and the cinematography is like eye candy.
-srvblooze
Problems arise.
And Nick is nearly killed by the Triads. To recover, Cassie uses the help of a “stitch” to heal him.
Stitch
Stitches are psychic surgeons trained to quickly reconstruct cells to their previous or healthy state.
Using only their hands, they can heal and even "unheal" whatever they have done. For more detailed work, Stitches use a silver based cream on their hands which acts as a conductor for their ability.
Once healed up, Nick and Cassie go to a nightclub on a hint from Cassie’s predictions.
Nick sees an old friend, “Hook” Waters, who happens to be a “Shifter”.
Shifters
Shifters can temporarily alter the appearance of an object by manipulating the patterns of light interacting with it.
Once the illusion is established, it remains with the object for a short period of time.
For example, a Shifter could touch a one dollar bill and alter it to appear as a one hundred dollar bill until the effect expires.
The object shifted must have roughly the same dimensions as the object it is shifted into. The length of time that the effect will last is based on the Shifter's experience and ability.
Shifters can temporarily alter the appearance of an object by manipulating the patterns of light interacting with it.
The shifter uses his abilities to make a replica of the clue in Cassie’s drawing and tells them to go to Emily Hu, a highly skilled “Sniffer” who can help them find Kira.
Sniffer
Sniffs are highly developed psychometrics who can track the location of people or objects over varying distances.
Like bloodhounds, their ability is increased if they have tactile access to an object that has been in direct contact with the subject.
Sniffs receive information in the form of images, which is why identifiable landmarks help increase their effectiveness.
Nick and Cassie find Kira, who once had a romantic relationship with Nick.
They recruit a “Shadow” named “Pinky” Stein to hide Kira from the “Sniffers”.
Shadows
Shadows are trained to block the vision of other clairvoyants such as Sniffs, making any subject within their target radius appear "dark".
Experience will enhance the size of the area they can shadow and the intensity of their shielding effect.
Shadows need to be awake to manifest their ability, so it is common for a detail of two Shadows to operate in shifts while protecting a person or object for extended periods.
Most Shadows are effective only against Sniffs, but some extremely powerful Shadows are able to block even Watchers.
Cassie finds the key to a locker in which Kira hid a valuable case.
With the aid of Cassie’s visions, they piece together the events that led them to meet; Cassie’s mother used her visions to set a complex plan in motion that will destroy Division.
The plan to thwart the American Government
Nick comes up with a plan that involves seven envelopes in which he places instructions; each person in the group is entrusted with one red envelope, and none are to be opened until the right time.
Thus no one knows the content in the envelopes. That way, no one knows the plan except the person who made the envelopes.
While Kira and Pinky leave in a taxi, Nick and Cassie share a goodbye. Cassie tells him to “take an umbrella, it’s going to rain”, he replies with “you be careful too”.
Nick uses a “Wiper” to erase his memories of the plan, ensuring that Watchers from both Division and the Triads will no longer be able to interfere.
Wiper
Wipers are skilled at either temporarily or permanently erasing memory, an invaluable asset in espionage.
Experience will dictate the accuracy of their wipes, though there is always the danger that they will eliminate a desired memory.
Wipers are skilled at either temporarily or permanently erasing memory, an invaluable asset in espionage.
Hook retrieves the case (which does not have 6 million dollars, but instead has the syringe Kira stole) and brings it back to Cassie.
He shifts another case to match the case with the syringe.
Cassie takes the shifted case to Nick’s apartment and waits.
Nick regains consciousness: he has no memory of the envelopes or his plan.
He opens his envelope, which tells him to return home.
He finds the case in his room but Carver introduces himself to Kira as a friend, stating that her memories are false; she is a Division agent who volunteered to take the augmentation injection and suffered amnesia as a side-effect.
Agent Carver is the All-Powerful, all-controlling United States government.
Carver shows Kira her badge.
She believes him, because (after all) her memories and all the events confirm this narrative.
Nick goes to retrieve the augmentation drug and confronts Carver and Kira.
Carver tells Kira and Nick that the relationship they believe they had never happened and a special evening together at Coney Island was a “push” memory.
Kira reveals she has been using Nick the entire time and Nick takes the three to the building which contain the lockers and the case.
They are ambushed by the Triads.
In the midst of the fight, Carver injures Nick.
Nick grabs the case and jams the syringe into his arm, which “kills” him. This is because, after all, the injection is fatal to over 90% of the people so injected.
After the fights ends, Nick wakes up. He wasn’t killed.
Cassie appears with an umbrella and smiles at him, “I told you it was going to rain” she tells him, revealing that it was part of the plan.
Cassie retrieves the true case, revealing that Nick injected himself with soy sauce, as they planned.
Asked whether they will see Kira again, Cassie tells Nick that they will see “little miss trouble-maker soon enough”.
“Little miss trouble-maker”, a watcher for the Triad.
Flying back to America with a sleeping Agent Carver, Kira opens her purse, finding her red envelope.
She remembers Nick telling her to open it when “she started doubting the truth” and opens it.
She finds a photograph of herself and Nick, obviously in a relationship, at Coney Island and a message that says “Kill him, See you soon!”.
Kira “pushes” Carver, commanding him to put his gun in his mouth and pull the trigger.
The screen fades to black, followed by the sound of a gun shot.
…
Push is also, as I said, greatly artistical.
It has a lot of fantastic colors and utilizes lighting very well, it's set in very beautiful environments, and there are a lot of other great cinematic techniques being used.
I especially like the choice of soundtrack in this movie.
It reminds me a lot of the way they choose to use music in The Dark Knight. Instead of some really catchy, noticeable soundtrack there's been a very diligent work done with a subtle yet powerful soundtrack that emerges only when necessary and gives an indescribable force to the movie.
All in all, Push is a quite non-mainstream, entertaining, good movie worth watching.
-that-wierd-guy
Conclusion
For you to really understand what is going on in this reality, that you inhabit, you need to understand that (just like in the movie “Push”) that there are very powerful forces that want to control your mind. If they cannot have you, control you or profit from you, then they will kill you.
Just like in the movie.
They have unlimited resources, buckets of money, skilled and talented assistants, and experts in abilities equal or better than the best you can cobble together.
Just like in the movie.
They control what everyone around you does, plans, thinks, behaves and acts upon.
Just like in the movie.
And they are convinced at how everything will work out. They believe that they will be successful stamping out what tiny inconsequential opposition that still remains to their idea of a global utopia.
Just like in the movie.
But, like the movie, you need to realize that there are ways for you to counter their efforts and avoid becoming one of the mindless zombies that they control. And all of these techniques are spelled out in the movie.
[1] Look at what is NOT being presented as “news”.
For the origin of the Coronavirus, all the discussions boil down to two narratives, and only two narratives.
The Coronavirus is either a natural pandemic or a Chinese bio-weapon. Nothing else.
There is absolutely ZERO coverage on the idea that it was all part of the Donald Trump "hybrid war" against China and that John Bolton was the man in charge of the United States Bio-weapon program.
Which is amazing as that theory is the only one where ALL of the puzzle pieces come together.
[2] If the subject is being presented in a thousand different ways and details, then you are GUARANTEED that it is a United States government narrative. It is not independent and unique. It’s just another color of “Soylant Green”.
Notice that the same narrative is not present in other international publications. Of those, only the ones associated with the "five eyes" intelligence organizations will have similar articles. With some "bleed over" into the EU.
[3] You have to control your memories, as to what is real and what is not, to be fully independent.
We have all be preconditioned to act like Pavlov's Dog. We instinctively behave in certain ways reactively without thinking.
All the time we believe what was taught to us as being correct.
But that is false. Very few things that you accept as truth are really factual. They are all erroneous programming.
So you all are concerned about vaccinations. You are worried about the implications of “passports” and RNA, and unproven issues, and all this against a virus that is promoted as being nothing special nor dangerous. And I am telling you that all the “news” is bullshit. All of it.
The truth is hidden from you.
The dangers to you and your family are real, but NOT what is being described. The American RNA vaccinations are adaptable. They have abilities to adapt to a wide spectrum of viruses and biological weapons.
…a wide spectrum of biological weapons.
And it is critical that people be vaccinated right NOW.
So please ignore all the noise. Be careful and judicious in the selection of the vaccine that you take, and realize that the West has opted for a very unlikely candidate to fight an apparently “harmless” virus.
That makes my, and all of my hidden friends*, hair stand on end.
"Hidden friends" and idiom that refers to non-public MM members who have prior experience in American Black Programs and who understandably do not want any public association with MM, but communicate with me through back channels.
I do not trust anything out of America. But that is just me.
The Sinopham vaccine is based on long-duration, tried and proven technology, but is limited to the Coronavirus.
The American vaccines seem to have a for-profit motive, does involve unproven technology, and is adaptable (with some other injection boosters) to be able to combat a spectrum of other viruses. All this points to the construction of a new type of vaccination market that would require boosters from everything from the common cold to smallpox.
…with some additional boosters (at a price)…
…with annual or semi-annual inoculations (also at a price)…
…can enable the human host to combat new viruses…
…that can vary from the common cold to Smallpox.
The evil American empire has some nefarious plans ahead. I do not know what they are. But I do know that discussion of this, and what the plans could be are functionally being omitted or steered away from the public dialog.
If you read about it in the “news”…
…then you are being misdirected.
Any questions, please query in the comments.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Of course, I have covered the insane level of disinformation, lies, and distortions that are spewed from the American media. I have discussed why and how this has come about, and have provided quite an excessive number of examples. But what this article is about is what is NOT being reported.
If you would tell an American that they are ignorant of the “news” they would laugh in your face. They would respond that that idea is absurd. With the millions of articles being pumped out hourly from the vast American media, in all of it’s forms, of course Americans are “well informed”.
But nope. Americans are not.
Americans are subject to a fire-hose of outright lies, intentional distortions, eye-catching gossip, nonessential tidbits, and fear mongering. It is amazing in it’s size, scope, intensity and diversity.
If you exist within the by now almost hermetically sealed-off mindscape of Western mainstream media, and if you also happen to like knowing the truth, then life must seem increasingly unfair to you—because you can’t win.For decades now the modus operandi has been as follows. Regardless of which party has the majority in Congress or controls the presidency, the same unchanging national (and increasingly transnational) elite ensconced in Washington sets the agenda and pushes it through using any means necessary, whether legal, illegal or blatantly criminal (increasingly the latter as national bankruptcy looms and desperation sets in).Their operatives make sure that there is no real investigation of what happened. All Western media reports that contradict the official mendacious narrative are quashed. Any independent efforts to investigate and to find out the truth are denigrated as “conspiracy theories”—a derogatory term coined by the CIA for exactly this purpose.Any non-Western media sources that dare to contradict the official mendacious narrative are ignored, subjected to ad hominem attacks and all manner of false allegations and, if all else fails, banned outright (as is currently happening with the satellite TV channel Russia Today).
But do not be under the impression and “real and actual news” is somehow caught up in this flood of articles. The good stuff are all culled away before Americans ever get near the truth. Americans never see the REAL news.
Some recent examples of “withheld news” include…
The use of drones to spray swine flu over Chinese pig farms.
The content of John Bolton’s meetings when he was the head of the American military bio-weapons office.
The Chinese complaint about American involvement of COVID-19 to the UN.
And those are just right at the top of my head.
If you read foreign news, you will be well aware of these events, but Americans… nope. they would rather read other things.
This particular article is going to concentrate on the public messages that both Putin and Xi Peng have been making to the United States. They are not being (accurately) reported at all.
Any reports are of the content style of “Foreign clownish national leader says something insulting to America. They are just jealous.” And the same yada, yada, yada that you can expect from the Alt-Right and the American mainstream press.
If we swallow the official lies we are being told, knowing full well that they are lies, then we feel like fools.
If we refuse to swallow them, then we either have to accept some alternative interpretation...
... or narrative as real in spite of lacking all the facts we need to prove the case...
...because nobody is going to give them to us—and risk ostracism and marginalization...
... or we have to take an agnostic stance and declare that while we are not privy to the truth.
We know enough to declare that the official story is a tissue of lies.
The first two of these are both clearly losing moves while the last is a refusal to play and therefore a forfeit; thus, all three are defeats.There are no winning moves here.But it’s even worse than that; not only do we lack a winning strategy, but we also happen to be on a losing team that doesn’t know how to play and loves to be played.
If Americans would read what I am presenting here, maybe they would start placing calls to their Congressmen representatives urging them to tone-down the belligerent aggressive war-drums.
Ai.
Take the example of the ill-fated US invasion of Iraq: 4,801 servicemen dead, 1,455,590 dead Iraqis, a once prosperous country destroyed and turned into a terrorist playground with a weak central government that is aligned with Iran, buying weapons from Russia and increasingly hostile toward the US.The war was sold to the public in the US using a technique called “proof by juxtaposition” which works like this: keep showing a picture of Bob next to a giant pile of corpses and eventually everyone comes to believe that Bob is a mass murderer, never mind the fact that Bob only killed maybe half a dozen people, and all but one in self-defense or by accident.This is what was done with Saddam Hussein (who, by the way, was Osama bin Laden’s arch-enemy, who, in turn, had worked for the CIA). By 2003 70% of Americans had been made to believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center.“Proof by juxtaposition” works well for the TV-addled zombies in the US, but for the rest of the world, as represented by the UN Security Council, a stronger tissue of lies had to be woven—using forged “intelligence” of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.” The world blinked and either voted for or failed to veto the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq.The putative weapons were never found and the intelligence that was used to convince the world of their existence turned out to have been fabricated.
But since the American people (the “sheeple”) are so dumbed down and are unaware of what is going on, no one is sending up messages to Washington, and so they all believe what they want to believe.
“Foreign clownish national leader says something insulting to America. They are just jealous.”
First up is an article about what Putin had to say to America and it’s “allies”…
Putin to Western Elites: Playtime is Over
An excellent blogger about Russia distills Putin’s Sochi speech into 10 simple points
Dmitry Orlov Thu, Mar 17 2016 .A longer version of this article originally appeared at the ClubOrlov blog. All credit to the author.
Most people in the English-speaking parts of the world missed Putin’s speech at the Valdai conference in Sochi a few years ago, and, chances are, those who have heard of the speech didn’t get a chance to read it, and missed its importance.
Western media did their best to ignore it or to twist its meaning. Regardless of what you think or don’t think of Putin (like the sun and the moon, he does not exist for you to cultivate an opinion) this is probably the most important political speech since Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech of March 5, 1946.
In this speech, Putin abruptly changed the rules of the game. Previously, the game of international politics was played as follows: politicians made public pronouncements, for the sake of maintaining a pleasant fiction of national sovereignty, but they were strictly for show and had nothing to do with the substance of international politics; in the meantime, they engaged in secret back-room negotiations, in which the actual deals were hammered out.
Previously, Putin tried to play this game, expecting only that Russia be treated as an equal. But these hopes have been dashed, and at this conference he declared the game to be over, explicitly violating Western taboo by speaking directly to the people over the heads of elite clans and political leaders.
Here’s what he said…
1. The games are OVER.
Russia will no longer play games and engage in back-room negotiations over trifles. But Russia is prepared for serious conversations and agreements, if these are conducive to collective security, are based on fairness and take into account the interests of each side.
2. America cannot guarantee anything.
All systems of global collective security now lie in ruins. There are no longer any international security guarantees at all. And the entity that destroyed them has a name: The United States of America.
3. There is no New World Order as envisioned by America.
The builders of the New World Order have failed, having built a sand castle. Whether or not a new world order of any sort is to be built is not just Russia's decision, but it is a decision that will not be made without Russia.
The UN failed.
The NWO failed.
And so America launched the “Rules Based Order”, and it is…
…failing.
4. Russia prefers cautious and careful diplomacy.
Russia favors a conservative approach to introducing innovations into the social order, but is not opposed to investigating and discussing such innovations, to see if introducing any of them might be justified.
5. Russia will not play any games that America has created.
Russia has no intention of going fishing in the murky waters created by America's ever-expanding “empire of chaos,” and has no interest in building a new empire of her own (this is unnecessary; Russia's challenges lie in developing her already vast territory). Neither is Russia willing to act as a savior of the world, as she had in the past.
6. Russia does not want to lead the world.
Russia will not attempt to reformat the world in her own image, but neither will she allow anyone to reformat her in their image. Russia will not close herself off from the world, but anyone who tries to close her off from the world will be sure to reap a whirlwind.
And neither does China.
Which, of course, runs contrary to the K-street narrative out of Washington DC.
7. Russia does not want war, but sees America eyeing it as the next world war.
Russia does not wish for the chaos to spread, does not want war, and has no intention of starting one. However, today Russia sees the outbreak of global war as almost inevitable, is prepared for it, and is continuing to prepare for it. Russia does not war—nor does she fear it.
8. Russia will not interfere in the goals and objectives of other nations, just leave it alone.
Russia does not intend to take an active role in thwarting those who are still attempting to construct their New World Order—until their efforts start to impinge on Russia's key interests. Russia would prefer to stand by and watch them give themselves as many lumps as their poor heads can take. But those who manage to drag Russia into this process, through disregard for her interests, will be taught the true meaning of pain.
This is what China is doing as well. It’s a big night and day comparison to what the Untied Sates and it’s “allies” are doing.
9. Russia is about Russians. Nothing else.
In her external, and, even more so, internal politics, Russia's power will rely not on the elites and their back-room dealing, but on the will of the people.
Yes., And China is for the Chinese.
To these nine points I would like to add a tenth:
10. There can be no unilateral action.
There is still a chance to construct a new world order that will avoid a world war. This new world order must of necessity include the United States—but can only do so on the same terms as everyone else: subject to international law and international agreements; refraining from all unilateral action; in full respect of the sovereignty of other nations.
To sum it all up: play-time is over. Children, put away your toys. Now is the time for the adults to make decisions. Russia is ready for this; is the world?
But Americans just don’t “get it”
They are living in some kind of stupid haze, or just morons, or perhaps they have never seen the pain and suffering and despair that war brings. Maybe they view war as something that is done far away and that doesn’t affect them. they don’t see that when Putin and Xi Peng are making these statements that they are not talking about Russians and Chinese dying. They are talking about American dying in mass.
They just don’t “get it”.
So here is another article. This one is about the absolute frustration that Putin has with the fucking morons that run the West.
Putin LOSES IT, Warns Journalists of War: ‘I Don’t Know How to Get Through to You People’
‘How do you not understand that the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction?’
Enrico Braun Wed, Jul 6 2016 | 320 words 238,361 Comments This post first appeared on Russia Insider.
Vladimir Putin has finally taken the kid gloves off.
The Russian president was meeting with foreign journalists at the conclusion of the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 17th, 2016 when he left no one in any doubt that the world is headed down a course which could lead to nuclear war.
This was in 2016, right before Trump was elected President of the United States.
Putin railed against the journalists for their “tall tales” in blindly repeating lies and misinformation provided to them by the United States on its anti-ballistic missile systems being constructed in Eastern Europe. He pointed out that since the Iran nuclear deal, the claim the system is to protect against Iranian missiles has been exposed as a lie.
The journalists were informed that within a few years, Russia predicted the US would be able to extend the range of the system to 1000 km. At that point, Russia’s nuclear potential, and thus the nuclear balance between the US and Russia, would be placed in jeopardy.
Putin completely lost patience with the journalists, berating them for lazily helping to accelerate a nuclear confrontation by repeating US propaganda.
He virtually pleaded with the western media, for the sake of the world, to change their line:
We know year by year what's going to happen, and they know that we know. It's only you that they tell tall tales to, and you buy it, and spread it to the citizens of your countries.
You people in turn do not feel a sense of the impending danger - this is what worries me.
How do you not understand that the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction?
While they pretend that nothing is going on.
I don't know how to get through to you anymore.
Does anyone in the reeking garbage heap that is the Western mainstream western media have a conscience? Do they even have enough intellect to get what Putin is saying – that they are helping to push the planet towards World War III?
That all was five years ago.
What about today?
Quite a bit has happened since Putin laid the line down with the West, and they repeatedly ignored his warnings. But you see trump started to focus on China instead, and that gave Russia a “breather” .
Of course the world has been turned upside down and no there is not a person alive who thinks that 2016 was an unstable time compared to the Biden / Trump years.
What has happened since then is a sequence of war events that were not reported in the Western press. And taken as a whole we can easily see what actually has transpired. And knowing this, and the results of the March 2021 Anchorage Alaska meeting, we know that after that meeting a significant shift occurred in Geo-political relations.
America told the world to accept it as their overlord or expect to be destroyed.
Russia, China and Iran formed a massive joint defense and economic block. Then laid out precise lines; “Red Lines” that will trigger World War III.
And sure, most certainly, the ambassadors have been quite clear on this.
And while I can well relate the various warnings over and over, and over to the moronic idiots who run Washington DC, let’s just keep things simple.
The stage has been set. Both China, and Russia are not going to pretend that America (and it’s cronies) are anything other than despotic-ruled military empire desirous of world conquest, and they WILL retaliate against the United States in a very substantive and spectacular way.
You all might as well ignore the “news”. None of this is being reported, and if you rely on the “news” for Intel, one day you will wake up in a reality that might not be to your liking.
No one is buying the mainstream media, or the same-old dialog any longer. It’s a new day. it’s a new beginning, and the old is sinking into the waters aflame. The only ones unable to see this are the rats scrambling on the deck of the collapsing ship.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Well China has unveiled a new operating system, and it is a BIG DEAL. And I am going to tell you why.
Why this is a big deal.
Presently America controls 99% of all operating systems in the world. America controls the vast number of computer operating systems (Microsoft, and Apple), and the vast number of cell phone operating systems (Microsoft, Google, and Android). The few remaining systems such and Linux and other odd-balls are hit and miss in regards to this control.
Now, I am not talking about American companies being in control of these operating systems.
Instead, I am discussing the American government controlling the operating systems themselves.
It is no secret that the United States government has offices in the development offices of Microsoft, Apple, and Google. And it is more than just “back doors” to operation access.
The Utah Data Collection Center.
To use any of these systems is to give the United States absolute control over your electronics,
As I can PERSONALLY affirm when the government burst into my home in 2006, seized my computer, plugged it into a machine and had full access effectively bypassing all of my passwords, biomedical fingerprint scanning mechanisms and folder locks. They (passwords, biometrics, etc.) are there to give you the illusion of security. The fact is, the US Government owns your computer and they can access it at will.
They can do it at any time. At any place, and there isn’t a fucking thing that you can do about it.
Enter China
This situation, where America has it’s fingers and hands on all communication and electronic communication, is dangerous. Not just for you as an individual who no longer has privacy in any form, but for governments who are exposed to electronic blackmail at the touch of a button.
Which pretty much explains the Morrison government in Australia.
Whether this is economic, such as what the Trump Administration was trying to do with Huawei, or domestically, such as the control of dams, pipelines, and military, the risk of a malevolent foreign actor… especially an out of control military empire such as the United States to have this ability is very, very dangerous.
And now China has it’s own OS.
And the entire “ballgame” has changed.
America must stop this from happening!
Thus we have an on-going war with everything Huawei.
After four years of anti-China disinformation, and anti-Huawei disinformation, most Americans will regurgitate the propaganda that they have been programmed.
All the sheeple feel “bad” about Huawei and have “bad experiences”. Not that they have any experiences, mind you, but they just regurgitate the narratives. And it’s like listening to a robot. Seriously.
I met a fellow who was like this just last week. We were in a Shaomi store, and we started chatting. He said that he didn’t like Huawei products. And so I naturally asked him why.
He said that he had a “bad experience” with it.
So, I wanted to know. What was it? Was it breaking down? Was it too expensive, did it remind him of a bad girl friend? What? Was he swindled? Did the screen fall off? Were there connection problems? What was it?
I asked him over and over.
All he would say for the umpteen time was that he had a “bad experience”. I was just about to give up when he admitted that he never really and actually owned a Huawei phone. It’s just that he read a lot of bad stuff about it.
Sheeple.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Harmony OS
After years of speculation and rumor, Chinese tech giant Huawei formally unveiled its Harmony OS operating system in 2019. It’s fair to say that more questions have been raised than answered. How does it work? What problems does it solve? And is it a product of the current feud between Huawei and the U.S. government?
Is Harmony OS Based on Linux?
No. Although both are free software products (or, more accurately, Huawei has pledged to release Harmony OS with an open-source license), Harmony OS is its own distinct product. Moreover, it uses a different design architecture to Linux, preferring a microkernel design over monolithic kernel.
But wait. Microkernel? Monolithic kernel? I’ve lost you.
Let’s try again. At the heart of every operating system is something called a kernel. Like the name implies, kernels are at the heart of every operating system, effectively serving as a foundation. They handle interactions with the underlying hardware, allocate resources, and define how programs are executed and operated.
All kernels have these fundamental responsibilities. However, they differ in how they work.
Let’s talk about memory. Modern operating systems try to segregate user applications (like Steam or Google Chrome) from the more sensitive parts of the operating system. Imagine an impenetrable line dividing the memory used by system-level services from your applications. There are two main good reasons for this: security and stability.
Microkernels, like the one used by Harmony OS, are extremely discerning about what runs in kernel mode, effectively limiting it to the basics.
Bluntly, monolithic kernels aren’t discerning. Linux, for example, allows many OS-level utilities and processes to run within this privileged space in memory.
At the time Linus Torvalds started work on the Linux kernel, microkernels were still something of an unknown quantity, with few real-world commercial uses. Microkernels also proved harder to develop, and tended to be slower.
Nearly 30 years later, things have changed. Computers are faster and cheaper. Microkernels have made the leap from academia into production.
The XNU kernel, which sits at the heart of macOS and iOS, lends much inspiration from earlier microkernel designs, namely the Mach kernel developed by Carnegie Mellon University. Meanwhile QNX, which forms the basis of the Blackberry 10 operating system, as well as many vehicular infotainment systems, uses a microkernel design.
It’s All About the Extensibility, Man
Because Microkernel designs are intentionally limited, they’re easy to extend. Adding a new system service, like a device driver, doesn’t require the developer to fundamentally alter or interfere with the kernel.
And that hints towards why Huawei chose this approach with Harmony OS. Although Huawei is perhaps best known for its phones, it’s a company involved in most sectors of the consumer technology market. Its lineup includes things like fitness wearables, routers, and televisions.
And let’s not even get into AI, robotics, infrastructure such as roads, trains and intelligent mining and farming initiatives.
And Huawei is an incredibly ambitious company. Taking a leaf from rival Xiaomi’s book, the firm has started selling IoT products through its youth-focused subsidiary Honor, including intelligent toothbrushes and smart desk lamps.
And while it’s not clear whether Harmony OS will run on every bit of consumer technology it ultimately sells, Huawei aspires to have an operating system that will run on as many devices as possible.
Part of the reason is compatibility. If you disregard hardware requirements, any application written for Harmony OS should work on any device running it. That’s an attractive proposition for developers. But it should also have benefits for consumers, too. As more and more devices become computerized, it makes sense for them to be able to easily work as part of a broader ecosystem.
But What About Phones?
It’s been nearly three years since the Trump administration’s Treasury Department placed Huawei on an “entity list,” thereby preventing American firms from trading with the company. While this has exerted pressure on all levels of Huawei’s business, the biggest pain has been felt in the company’s mobile division, preventing it from releasing new devices with Google Mobile Services (GMS) included.
Google Mobile Services is effectively the entire Google ecosystem for Android, including mundane apps like Google Maps and Gmail, as well as the Google Play Store. With Huawei’s latest phones lacking access to most apps, many have wondered whether the Chinese giant will abandon Android, instead moving to a homegrown operating system.
This seems unlikely. At least, in the short term.
For starters, Huawei’s leadership has reiterated its commitment to the Android platform. Instead, it’s focused on developing its own alternative to GMS called Huawei Mobile Services (HMS).
At the heart of this is the company’s app ecosystem, the Huawei AppGallery. Huawei states it’s spending $1 billion to close the “app gap” with the Google Play Store and has 3,000 software engineers working on it.
A new mobile operating system would be forced to start from scratch. Huawei would have to attract developers to port or redevelop their apps for Harmony OS. And, as we’ve learned from Windows Mobile, BlackBerry 10, and Samsung’s Tizen (and previously Bada), that’s not an easy proposition.
That said, Huawei is one of the most well-resourced tech firms in the world. And thus, it would be unwise to completely dismiss the prospect of a Harmony OS-powered phone.
Made in China 2025
There’s an interesting political angle to discuss here. For decades, China has acted as the world’s factory, building products designed overseas. But in recent years, China’s government and its own private sector has invested heavily in research and development. Increasingly, Chinese-designed products are making their way onto the international stage, offering new competition for Silicon Valley’s tech elite.
Amidst this, the Beijing government has an ambition it calls “Made in China 2025.” Effectively, it wants to end its reliance on imported high-tech products, such as semiconductors and airplanes, replacing them with their own homegrown alternatives. The motivation from this stems from economic and political security, as well as national prestige.
Harmony OS fits into this ambition perfectly. If it takes off, it’ll be the first globally successful operating system to emerge from China—with the exception of those used in niche markets, like cellular base stations. These homegrown credentials will come in particularly handy should the cold war between China and the United States continue to rage.
And as a result, I wouldn’t be surprised for Harmony OS to have some very enthusiastic supporters in the central government, as well as within the wider Chinese private sector. And it’s these supporters who will ultimately determine its success.
China Manufactures hardware for the world
99% of all hardware is made in China. What happens when China decides not to preload Windows 10, Apple OS, or Linux and only allows Harmony OS installed?
Sure you can write over the OS when you get the hardware. And that is probably what will happen. Certainly in the USA, American will be FORCED to use American OS.
It will begin as coercion. Where Americans will be warned about the dangers of Harmony OS.
Then it will be mandated by law.
Americans will be FORCED to use American computer operating systems. Just like they are forced to do other things, like pay taxes, buy health insurance, register guns, show identification to buy alcohol, and buy car insurance, etc.
Americans will be forced to use systems to allow their monitoring by the US government.
But that’s not the real concern. Actually. Americans lost their freedoms back hundreds of years ago.
What the real concern is that Microsoft will lose it’s substantial market share, as will google, and Apple. And without this dominance int he market will come a slowly eroding Intel collection ability for the American government.
And the folk at Langley are all in arms about it.
Keep in mind why the United States government wants you to hate Huawei.
Conclusion
The United States dominance on access to privacy, control of information, control of the media, and manipulation of thought are all being challenged by China. And the oligarchy inside of Washington DC do not like this one single bit.
They are flooding the media with warnings, fears and hype and doing everything within their power to assure complete dominance in the intelligence, and communication technologies.
The sheeple believe this.
That is because they have nothing else to compare it against. So they believe the one thousandth article on why Huawei is dangerous and how China is stealing from YOU!
Do not believe it.
If you all could only see things from my point of view, from me…
…standing outside…
…and looking in at the absolutely insanity inside of America today, you too would see what is going on and why.
And a nice little video that I took. I want all you you readers in MM land to start seeing what it is like living outside of America. So that you can see how God-awful America has become. You can watch it HERE. 180MB.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
Can you believe that the morons in the American “news” media, the assholes in Washington DC, and the “talking heads” all still refer to America as a “democracy”. Really! Seriously!
It’s a De Facto Military Empire.
It’s the largest Military Empire in history. And it lives for war. The vast budget of America is devoted to…
…wait for it…
…war!
Ah…
Which goes to show you just how stupid and idiotic America is today. It’s no longer a matter of being delusional. It’s a matter of pure and utter insanity and stupidity.
The American government would look quite different if it was focused on serving the needs of it’s people. It would look something like this…
But you know, people are slowly waking up. It only took them all until the nation is teetering at the edge of the cliff to notice, but well, better late than never. Don’t you know.
I initially found this on MoA in the comment section. It’s pretty good and I expounded upon it. It was originally found on Zero Hedge alongside the rest of the COVID nonsense that is day-to-day fodder in the “alternative” media.
Ah. You know what I am talking about; that Coronavius is just an excuse for more government powers.
Yup. It’s a comfortable narrative.
Far easier to digest than the truth; that the Coronavirus was a part of a multi-stage bio-weapons attack against China on CNY that went “tits up”.
go tits up[1] rude slang To break or malfunction; to die, fall apart, or cease to work. (A play on the phrase "go belly up." "Tits up" is sometimes hyphenated.)
[2] rude slang By extension, to have a poor, undesired, or ruinous outcome; to fail completely or not come together at all.
Never the less, the obvious points that he had made are worthy of consideration, and at that, I have expounded upon that comment and added my very own “two cents”.
Here are Ten Things We Have Learned …. about American (and United States) government, democracy and the superiority of “the American way of life”, “freedom” and “liberty”…
1. The American political system is hopelessly corrupt.
It is irredeemably corrupt. Virtually all politicians are hopelessly corrupt. No political party can be trusted. They all can be, and have been, bought. They serve themselves, pretend to work in the interests of the nation while all the time acting as the "bag men" for the oligarchy.
2. Democracy is a sham.
It has been a sham for a very long time.
There will never be any real democracy when money and power amount to the same thing.
The Founding Fathers who wrote the Federalist Papers were absolutely correct. A Republic tends to turn into a Democracy. A Democracy tends to turn into an Oligarchy, and an Oligarchy tends to devolve into a Military Empire if left unchecked.
America is an oligarchy ruled military empire. It hasn't been a democracy for centuries.
3. The system will stop at nothing to hold on to its power and, if possible, increase its levels of control and exploitation.
It has no scruples. No lie is too outrageous, no hypocrisy too nauseating, no human sacrifice too great.
Those in power are psychopaths, surrounded by psychopathic toadies, and empowered by a corrupt well-established "good old boys" network.
4. So-called radical movements are usually nothing of the sort.
From whatever direction they claim to attack the system, they are just pretending to do so.
These "radical movements" are just useful tools of the oligarchy, and serve to channel discontent in directions which are harmless to the power clique and even useful to its agendas.
5. Any “dissident” voice you have ever heard of through corporate media is probably a fake.
The system does not hand out free publicity to its actual enemies.
The entire media machine is owned, run, funded (either directly or indirectly) by the government, or it's controlling interests; the oligarchy.
Real and actually dissident voices are silenced through technological means, or barring that, killed outright.
6. Most people in our society are cowards.
They will jettison all the fine values and principles which they have been loudly boasting about all their lives merely to avoid the slightest chance of public criticism, inconvenience or even minor financial loss.
Additionally, most American people have a price, and they will sell their soul, their businesses, their families and their futures for financial gain.
7. The mainstream media is nothing but a propaganda machine for the system…
...and those journalists who work for it have sold their sorry souls, placing their (often minimal) writing skills entirely at the disposition of Power.
There are no longer any true dissident voices, or real journalism.
Those that try to practice it must rely on social networks to get their messages heard, and the government, in one way or the other, controls all social media.
8. Police are not servants of the public…
...but servants of a powerful and extremely wealthy minority which seeks to control and exploit the public for its own narrow and greedy interests.
9. Scientists cannot be trusted.
They will use the hypnotic power of their white coats and authoritative status for the benefit of whoever funds their work and lifestyle.
He who pays the piper calls the tune. And they all live for government funding. Either direct, or though an NGO that is supervised through the government.
10. Progress is a misleading illusion.
The “progress” of increasing automation and industrialization does not go hand in hand with a progress in the quality of human life.
Rather, it is becoming increasingly evident, that it will tend to “progressively” reduce it to the point of complete extinction unless managed expertly and adroitly.
So… is “black”, actually “white”?
There is a percentage of the population in America that is waking up to the fact that the American government is corrupt. That it controls all media, not just the mainstream media, and that “alternative” media outlets are all corrupted. And the beloved alternatives are now, themselves part of the government narrative.
To check who is who…
See which of your favorite “alternative media” sources are parroting the government line. Let’s use this one; “China is the source of Coronavirus, and they are covering it up.”
Any “alternative media” that repeats some form of this narrative, is a de facto arm of the American government.
When they should really be talking about how neocon John Bolton (psychopathic neocon) was put in charge of the bio-weapons office in 2017.
When anyone is talking about Coronavirus being a bio-weapon but omits this most critical piece of information should tell you reams about what your source of information is. That’s like buying a new automobile without wheels, an engine, and a steering wheel.
If you cannot see that your beloved “alternative media” are simply parroting one of three key media talking directions, then you too… must be… a sheeple.
And while I am at it…
How all that “dangers of 5G” working out now?
Why, all the news articles about it all suddenly came to an end when American companies were able to compete against the Chinese lead in 5G technology. Imagine that! What a coincidence!
Who was promoting the “don’t use 5G” narrative?
Rush Limbaugh
Hall Turner
FOX News
The ones who promoted the government narrative, are themselves agents of the government.
Remember, boys and girls, your most beloved “alternative media” are just mouthpieces of the government. That way they control your actions and your behaviors by controlling your favorite news outlets. They construct one of three narratives and you end up following the narrative that appeals to what you want to believe.
Meanwhile, what is actually going on is hidden from sight.
Alt-Right
“It’s the evil Chinese. They mishandled a bio-weapon that they stole and are covering it up.”
Mainstream
“Everything is just fine, and America will recover soon.”
Alt-Left
“Don’t be afraid. Everything is under control and the Coronavirus is being tracked.”
Conclusion
I need a beer.
Is there any American out there in MM land that disagrees with this appraisal? If so, I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter. Personally, I found it “on point” and accurate. But then again, I have a “bone to pick” with the USA, so I am biased.
And with that in mind, let me close with a short video that I made of my life here in China. It’s all of a few minutes long and worth the while for you all to have some perspective what things are like…
…for me on the outside looking into the house of madness that the USA is today. The video is HERE. 150MB.
To understand what is going on inside of the forest, you need to step out of it, climb a nearby hill and look at the bigger picture. There, from that vantage point, you will be able to see a much clearer and bigger picture of what is going on.
Forest Fire.
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
There was a song that I used to listen to by Triumph called “It’s Just a Game”. Their theme, at the time, was that life was just one game after the other. Ah. It was a nice theme, but you know, maybe they were right? Humans follow the rules of society, and when you have rules, you are actually playing a game.
Such as described in a particular song “Lay it on the line” where they decry the apparent game-play in relationships. It’s all just a game. Work. Relationships. Career. Family.
It’s all just a game.
And sure things have changed since the late 1970’s when I listened to this music and used the album covers to clean my nickel bags of twigs and seeds. And when I would have parties at my parent’s house with beer, whiskey, and (then illegal) marijuana.
Yes, sure things have changed since the late 1970’s.
But just because you are not wearing earth shoes, elephant bell-bottom trousers, and a fringe leather vest, doesn’t mean that the ideas and concepts of that time …
…were just short-lived conceptional fads. Perhaps what we thought at that time was actually correct. Maybe life was actually a game.
And whether you were downing Rolling Rock beer, or Coors, or an imported Beck’s beer you were too distracted to take note on the “rules of the game”. You just accepted your role. Whether it was a pawn, a rook, or a knight.
Maybe life was actually a game.
And maybe…
…just maybe…
…we all have been taking it far too seriously.
Life is a game and we have been taking it far too seriously.
And thus, maybe we should sit back, and stop being so anal about life. So what if you want to drive home and have lunch with your family during lunch break? So what if you want to go have a smoke outside? So what if you need to stretch your legs and walk around the building to give yourself a chance to think. So what if you want to have a icy cold beer at lunch with your hamburger?
In England you can get a beer with your whopper. It’s all very English, don’t you know.
Imagine that! Well, why not get a bottle from the quickie-mart, get some takeout burgers and drink the beer, eat the burger in a park?
That’s always a good idea. I used to do that. I would hop in my car, go through the drive through and order a combo meal, and then drive to a shady glade and sit there listening to El’ Rush Bo. I wouldn’t dare buy a beer. That would have gotten me fired. Not that they needed the excuse, mind you. In those days, they treated employees like toilet paper. Use and discard. Use and discard. Use and discard. There was always plenty more where they came from.
Of course, I do not advise sitting in the car listening to Rush Limbaugh right now. Since, he’s dead, and the narrative is still the alt-right US government propaganda. They are still following the script, set forth by John Bolton back in 2016, and drinking coke-cola daily is not good for you, and it’s lonely to boot.
But heck…
Go ahead, get a taco salad, and get a beer from the quickie mart, and go to a park.
What?
No park?
Well, how about driving your car to the never-visited cemetery at the end of the lane. Pulling over and either sitting in your car under the shade of a mighty oak tree, or getting out and enjoying the beer on a granite tombstone?
Lunch in a car is a typical way that American corporate clones get some private time.
What?
The grounds-keeper might call the police for observing your flagrant display of enjoying lunch with a beer in a quiet park setting!
Sacrilege!
Go to a cemetery and enjoy a beer.
Like I am saying. We are playing the game too seriously, and we are way too caught up in it.
If you are a corporate drone, and you sit back. Watch how you are participating inside a big elaborate game. And …
It's just a game, you're in it all the way
It's just a game, don't let yourself slip away
It's such a shame, I heard somebody say
It's just a game, and all I can do...is play
And it is a game.
And the rules of the game are constantly changing, and we are all adapting to the changing rules instead of defining our own rules.
Did you realize that they made a female version of Sherlock Holmes? Yup. I am not shitting you. It’s a bonafied version of Sherlock Holmes with his sister taking all the credit. Jeeze! It’s called Enola Holmes(2020).
When Enola Holmes-Sherlock's teen sister-discovers her mother missing, she sets off to find her, becoming a super-sleuth in her own right as she outwits her famous brother and unravels a dangerous conspiracy around a mysterious young Lord.
It’s all just a game.
Don’t get too caught up in it.
I dug up this interesting article on Strategic Culture, and it’s worth a study. Now, before we get into the subject matter too deeply, let’s consider life as a human has evolved (devolved?) into some kind of game with rules. All of which were created by other humans a long, long time ago. And we are all stuck “playing the game”, when we really don’t have to…
The Curse of Game Theory: Why It’s in Your Self-Interest to Exit the Rules of the Game
Game theory, the mathematical theory of games of strategy, was developed by John von Neumann. It was created in several successive stages from 1928 and into 1940-41. It was published in his book “Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour” which he co-authored with Oskar Morgenstern.
The crux of the theory is that an individuals’ behavior will always be motivated towards achieving an optimal outcome, which is determined by self-interest.
An assumption made is that the players in such a game are rational, which translates to, “will strive to maximize their payoffs in the game”.
In other words, it is assumed they are motivated by selfish self-interests.
Over the years, other contributors such as John Nash (Nash equilibrium) and John Maynard Smith (evolutionary stable strategy) have added to the theory.
Today, we are now at a point where it is considered by many to be an essential tool when modelling economic, political, sociological or military behaviors and outcomes.
As such, it is taught as such in many prestigious universities as something pretty much set in stone.
But what if we have made a terrible mistake?
After all, it is acknowledged by the theorists themselves that the entire functioning of their model relies upon the assumption that we are governed by rational selfish behavior.
People feel confident about this assumption since reality has apparently confirmed this fact to them.
But what if this game is not objectively mirroring a truthful depiction of us?
What if this game has rather, been used as a conditioning tool, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a positive feedback loop?
How can we know what is true?
How can we know what kind of a person we truly are and not what we have been conditioned to think of ourselves as?
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
Before we can answer such a question, we need to look at the forms of simplification and assumptions that were used.
This may be counter-intuitive to some, but the “philosophy” or “hypothesis” must always precede the actual model.
The [1] variables you choose to use, [2] the variables you discount for, [3] how you define the variables, [4] how you define the relationship between the variables are not being defined by the model, but rather the creator of the model.
Once the model is created it can now, theoretically, add to that beginning structure and mimic a simplified version of reality.
However, we should keep in mind that a model that has been created on a false hypothesis could still “function.”
That is, of course, if the variables are not too much in contradiction to the other variables’ operations.
Such a model is not “aware” that it is not a representation of “reality,” and cannot indicate so to its creator.
Thus, a model can be a representation of a simplified reality or it can represent a completely artificial reality.
The Disclaimers
At the beginning of von Neumann’s book, he goes through several disclaimers which are highly problematic towards the relevance of his theory.
One of them being the acknowledgement that “there exists, at present, no satisfactory treatment of the question of rational behavior.
There may, for example, exist several ways by which to reach the optimum position.
They may depend upon the knowledge and understanding which the individual has and upon the paths of action open to them, because they imply, as must be evident, quantitative relationships.”
As becomes rapidly evident, von Neumann makes endless assertions such as these.
As if they were obvious and thus need not be examined at all.
The assumption that an under-defined “rational” selfish behavior is merely quantifiable and nothing more…
… and does not account for qualitative change (a mathematician’s worst nightmare)…
… is taking great liberty in over-simplifying human behavior to conveniently fit the limited parameters of his model.
In other words, it is cheating.
You are manipulating the definitions and interactions of your variables to fit an artificial reality of your model.
An Example of how this model fails
Let me give you an example.
In Euclid’s fifth postulate, it is considered a “rule” that two parallel lines will never intersect. Euclid was alive around the time of the mid-4th century BCE, before Eratosthenes (276-194 BCE) made his beautifully elegant discovery that the Earth was indeed curved and also made a pretty accurate first measurement of the size of Earth.
That is, Euclid assumed a linear geometric space upon which the real universe was expected to “fit”. While it is true that two parallel lines will never meet on a two-dimensional plane, they can meet on a three-dimensional plane.
As is now understood, line A and line G, can be measured as 90 degrees from the equator line and thus are parallel lines, and yet they can eventually interface with each other if the surface is curved.
The problem with assumptions such Euclid’s is that they are ultimately only true in an artificial situation and are not reflective of how such things will interact in reality. Also, there is no way to predict from Euclid’s fifth law, how two parallel lines would interact in a three dimensional space, let alone in n dimensional space as described by the physicist Bernard Riemann.
Ironically, in his book, von Neumann likens his “pioneering” work in the field of game theory to that of what physicists have been doing for centuries, that is, mathematical formulations that represent, albeit simplified, the “laws of nature,” concerning matter and energy. However, von Neumann again showcases that he has no comprehension as to what constitutes the foundation for such “laws of nature.”
…but rather dimensions defined by an ever growing array of discovered physical principles such as magnetism, light, heat, gravity, sound, etc….
… each organizing principle being ironically characterized by both a finiteness and unboundedness with quantized least-action pathways discoverable therein.
According to Euclid’s logic, you never “see” two parallel lines intersecting and thus it is unfathomable that they ever could intersect.
His “rule” was based off of shared assumptions of what we “think” we are observing in such phenomena, however, this is not necessarily reality and it certainly does not translate to a “rule” that governs all.
By von Neumann acknowledging that he himself is heavily relying on his so-called “self-evident” truths in simplifying human behavior…
… he is asserting an outcome…
… he is not proving the outcome’s natural occurrence.
The Robinson Crusoe example in Monetarist Economic Theory
According to von Neumann, the Robinson Crusoe example was used by the Austrian economic school to model an individual’s behavior towards maximizing pay-off in an environment (in this case an island) where the resources available to you are set and limited.
There are many problems with this…
… but the most unforgivable one is the assumption of a set, limited and unchanging reserve of resources available to the individual.
In other words, the Austrian school of economy and von Neumann with them, consider Crusoe’s deserted island as the perfect case study for a limited resource, zero-sum game scenario.
Ironically, this assertion is entirely missing the point of what actually occurs in Daniel Defoe’s story of “Robinson Crusoe,”…
…and it causes one to wonder whether these theorists ever read the book or rather read a two line cliff’s notes synopsis.
Henry C. Carey, Lincoln’s economic advisor, would say in his book “Unity of Law” (1872):
“Crusoe having made a bow, had thus acquired wealth; that wealth exhibiting itself in the power obtained over certain natural properties of wood and muscular fibre, thereby enabling him to secure increased supplies of food with greatly diminished expenditure of labor.
Having made a canoe, he found his wealth much increased, his new machine enabling him to obtain still further increase of food, and of the raw materials of clothing, at still decreased cost of personal effort.
Erecting a pole on his canoe, he now commands the services of wind, and with each and every step in this direction finds himself advancing, with constantly accelerated rapidity, toward becoming master of nature, and a being of real wealth and power.”
Does that sound like the description of a “limited resource,” “zero-sum game” scenario?
In other words, where is the “set” limit?
The limit is constantly being readjusted to what the individual creates which changes his/her relationship to the “utility” of the resource.
For example, the resource wood, depending on the individual’s innovation can be used to keep one warm and dry, cook food, create weapons, create shelter, create a ship for travel etc. etc.
The existence of yet-to-be-created potential thus offsets the entire system of von Neumann because his system has no way of predicting potential, i.e. qualitative transformations, nor how it will affect behavior.
If you cannot predict future qualitative change, which is ongoing, such as the discovery of electricity or the creation of man-made Plutonium and other transuranic elements…
… or the potential waiting to be unlocked by the very feasible fusion plasma torch that can turn landfills into resource mines…
… how can you assume a defined set limit or even a defined zero-sum game as a “self-evident” truth when you cannot even predict what is the limit?
The Supposed Paradox of “The Greatest Good for the Greatest Possible Number”
In von Neumann’s book he refers to “the greatest good for the greatest possible number” as a contradiction, because according to von Neumann you cannot maximize two or more functions at once, that in a social economy, all maxima are desired at once by various players.
That is, there is no concept that it is possible to cooperate and share an optimal outcome, without it coming out of “your” share so to speak, that comes at a cost of having less instead of more.
This is a very basic understanding of economy, and again does not account for how cooperation and creative potential can work to transform the “goods” of an outcome.
For instance, country A is militarily stronger than country B, which is rich in many raw resources.
Country A is also stronger politically than country B in that, there are no other countries that will likely intervene against country A’s actions if it chooses to invade country B.
What course of action will yield the greatest return to country A?
Well, there is a very obvious answer to that question; however, contrary to popular thought it will not yield the greatest optimal outcome.
The greatest optimal outcome is rather to cooperate.
It is in both country A and country B’s best interest to share knowledge, even if country A has much more knowledge, such that country B develops the capability to refine its raw resources.
By doing so, country B will yield a greater return in trade over the long-term to country A, and country A does not have to worry about a future retaliation from country B.
By developing a more advanced economy the wealth of trade is increased for both countries.
By cooperation, the optimal outcome is transformed and offers a greater return.
This is exactly the model that is being used by China presently in their philosophy of “win-win cooperation,” and it has proven itself most effective despite all attempts to villainize it as something nefarious.
Rather than fight over resources, there is a cooperation to share technology, increase resource yield and share a greater boon than originally existed.
John von Neumann goes on to state in his book, that the more players in the model, the easier it is to predict the outcome, since the use of statistics and probability are increasingly better indicators of behavior and performance. As he states:
“When the number of participants becomes really great, some hope emerges that the influence of every particular participant will become negligible and that the above difficulties may recede and a more conventional theory become possible. These are, of course, the classical conditions of ‘free competition’.”
He goes on to use the example of our solar system, with its nine major bodies, as being much harder to model than 10^25 freely moving gas particles, as per gas theory, simply due to the sheer number of objects you are dealing with.
This is truly a remarkably absurd statement, where von Neumann is asserting that if the solar system had more major bodies orbiting within it, it would thus be easier to model based off of probability.
Every planet in our solar system is a different size and weight, with a different number of moons. Every planet revolves around the sun in imperfect elliptical orbits that change slowly overtime, the planets travel along these orbits in a non-uniform way that is observable through planetary retrograde motions.
The fact is that our solar system is not some perfectly closed system that is uniform and consistent in its actions, there are cyclical changes but there are also non-cyclical changes that are occurring.
This is due to our solar system orbiting around a galactic center of the Milky Way which is itself moving in yet-to-be discovered ways within a larger cluster of galaxies.
Therefore, you cannot use any theory of probability because the system is in a state of ongoing non-linear change. The more bodies you add to such a system the more complex it becomes, not the more negligible.
For example, there exists no straightforward formula to identify all prime numbers, though there are an infinite number of prime numbers.
Prime numbers are a reflection of a non-linear process of change.
Such an oversimplification of nature shows the audacity behind the assumptions that make up such formulations like game theory.
You are nothing more than a virtual avatar in their synthetic world with programmed limits to what you can and cannot do in the game they have created for you.
Game theory does not represent the motivations behind human nature, but rather imposes such limitations since, as they acknowledge themselves, it is easier to predict and control your chosen selfish behaviors which are encouraged and rewarded with “incentives.”
It is a system of enslavement that encourages its slaves to fight each other for “table scraps” and never question the hand that withholds, the system that creates false scarcity and promotes antagonism over artificial stressors.
We are taught never to question the rules given to us in these game theory scenarios, but to react accordingly to what has been defined to us as a limited set of options in an artificial scenario.
Perhaps the best indicator to this is, ironically, the very creator of the prisoner’s dilemma, John Nash. Nash had won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994 for his “landmark” work beginning in the 1950s on game theory.
Although it is not clear whether he was suffering with paranoid schizophrenia when he developed the Nash Equilibrium, starting in 1959, Nash would go in and out of mental hospitals for over nine years.
In 2007, he was interviewed while still working at Princeton. Here is his very unselfish offering of his “enlightenment” (his words) on game theory after over 50 years of work in the field. Keep in mind he is using the definition of rational behavior according to game theory, which is defined as a selfish self-interest:
“I have had some trouble myself on the psychological level; I’ve been in mental hospitals…
I realize that what I had said at some time may have overemphasized rationality…
And I don’t want to overemphasize rational thinking on the part of humans…
Human beings are much more complicated, the human being as a businessman….
Human behavior is not entirely motivated by self-interest of each human…
...game theory works in terms of self-interest, but…
...some game theory concepts could be unsound. There is over-dependence on rationality. That is my enlightenment.”
The entire West are basing all their plans, their strategies, their efforts, and their predictions upon “Game Theory”. But this theory is faulted,; tremendously faulted, and those that follow it against a society that has a better understanding of how the world works, will lose.
And the entire world is waking up to this realization.
There’s one easy prediction, though. The US is just about done as a world power, society, economy, concept or even joke.
- One night in Amerika
Inside America you have people that are watching their world crumble around them… and it’s not a game, and they want out.
On the global stage, we see nations in competition and those that follow the “Game theory” model fail, time and time again.
The world belongs to those societies that embrace things as they are, and not as they want them to be. And that means getting off the game board, and changing out the game pieces for real, tangible and accurate measures of society.
Daily Video Report
I am going to add a semi-daily video report on what is going on in China. This is going to be my first one. I took it about 45 minutes ago. I guess you can say it’s my pissed off opinions to counter the wide-spread of lies and disinformation that bombards my morning feeds day-in and day-out.
You can view it HERE. 137MB. I talk a bit about cameras and why the “color revolution” sponsored by the NED (the CIA) failed in Hong Kong. Of course, you will never read what I am talking about in the Western press.
They have more important things to talk about, don’t you know…
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
For the longest time, I had believed that the Strauss and Howe predictions for the Fourth Turning was correct but that the timing was slightly off. Instead of a Crisis Catalyst in 2005 and a Climax in 2020. I argued that the Crisis Catalyst occurred three years later in 2008. Which would launch a Climax in 2023.
Now I am not so sure.
What Strauss and Howe stated
If the Crisis catalyst comes on schedule, around the year 2005, then the climax will be due around 2020, the resolution around 2026. What will America be like as it exits the Fourth Turning? History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong—the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Since Vietnam, many Americans suppose they know what it means to lose a war. Losing in the next Fourth Turning, however, could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence—and perhaps even our nation—might never recover. As many Americans know from their own ancestral backgrounds, history provides numerous examples of societies that have been wiped off the map, ground into submission, or beaten so badly they revert to barbarism.
Indeed, the dates are close but seem to be off by a few years.
In our case, it appears that the “Crisis catalyst” did not occur in 2005 as predicted. It occurred in 2008 with the Wall Street “too big to fail” debacle.
That was three years later.
But does that mean that the Climax would also be delayed by three years?
I am now thinking “no”.
What is the Forth Turning Crisis?
This is what Strauss and Howe wrote;
And finally we enter the Fourth Turning, which is a Crisis.
This is an era in which America’s institutional life is torn down and rebuilt from the ground up—always in response to a perceived threat to the nation’s very survival.
Civic authority revives, cultural expression finds a community purpose, and people begin to locate themselves as members of a larger group.
In every instance, Fourth Turnings have eventually become new “founding moments” in America’s history, refreshing and redefining the national identity.
Currently, this period began in 2008, with the Global Financial Crisis and the deepening of the War on Terror, and will extend to around 2030.
If the past is any prelude to what is to come, as we contend, consider the prior Fourth Turning which was kicked off by the stock market crash of 1929 and climaxed with World War II.
Just as a Second Turning reshapes our inner world (of values, culture and religion), a Fourth Turning reshapes our outer world (of politics, economy and empire).
To be clear, the road ahead for America will be rough.
But I take comfort in the idea that history cycles back and that the past offers us a guide to what we can expect in the future.
Like Nature’s four seasons, the cycles of history follow a natural rhythm or pattern. Make no mistake. Winter is coming. How mild or harsh it will be is anyone’s guess but the basic progression is as natural as counting down the days, weeks and months until Spring.
As you can see, the essay originally published on 3/11/19 by Neil Howe confirmed that the “Crisis catalyst” did not occur in 2005 as predicted. It occurred in 2008 with the Wall Street “too big to fail” debacle.
But no one knows exactly WHEN the actual Crisis will occur.
It could be as early as 2020, or as late as 2025. And as I look at what is going on around the world, most especially with the belligerent activities of the American military empire, I see elements of a Hot War everywhere.
A “hot war” is a hallmark of this Crisis.
The Hot War
America has been involved in all sorts of operations against China since 2017 when Trump become President and John Bolton was put in charge of the Bio-Weapons office.
John Bolton was in charge of the American military bio-weapons operation.
Most notably was the attempt(s) at trying to generate famine and starvation inside China. This all was attempted by the selective destruction of food, grains, and livestock via drone-propagated bio-weapons.
But…
…it is when PEOPLE are targeted for death and destruction is when a “hot war” occurs.
I am convinced that the Hot War started in 2020 with the carpet bombing of China by the three strains of bio-weapons designed to target the Chinese people.
COVID-19 strain B against China, Iran. (Death by seizure virus) February 2020
No longer was the COVID-19 A-strain (light sniffle virus) going to provide herd immunity. The lethal B-strain was starting to rampage. And Americans started to “drop like flies” just like they did inside of China on CNY2020.
Oh, well, that was not to the liking of President Trump.
Washington still did not accept the message…
So that is when he unleashed the (Death by diarrhea virus) in July 2020 in China. This is a very, very nasty tick based virus. In Beijing. You do realize that there are no ticks in Beijing, don’t you?
Ah, the American media...
...keeping Americans stupefied since 1980.
And as soon as the CIA courtiers handed the vials to their local assets inside of China…
…these “assets”, in a strong action suggesting of Chinese patriotism, and perhaps some Geo-political understanding…
… dutifully handed over the vials to the PLA immediately.
And Washington DC was stunned.
So. Round Two. Or is it three, or four…
So then round two, the two-double punch, was unleashed. H1N1 flu G4 strain (Death by diarrhea virus) July 2020. It’s an extremely dangerous, lethal and contagious swine flu that was adapted to kill humans.
And yet again…
… the CIA assets dutifully handed over the vials to the PLA.
And China took action. China started to perform the “famous” anal swabs for testing for the three viral agents, and the American press is aghast as to why would China dare do this for a simple “flu like” virus.
Ah. The ignorance of the manipulated American sheeple.
But China handling three bio-weapons strains and interrogating the CIA assets inside of China did not go down well in Washington. As soon as it was discovered that the Chinese (and Russian) leadership were aware of what was going on…
But nothing happened, and three days later, in October 2020 he exited. With a remarkable “cure”. In which case he was miraculously cured in three days. And the media was all aghast at how amazing the President was to get cured so quickly.
Ah. American sheeple. Kept as clueless as ever.
Now, of course, none of this is reported in the “news”. At least not in context. It’s just random noise with no contextual meaning or connections.
So a Carrier Battle Group set sail for China
But you know, the morons in Washington DC, and Jesus H. Christ, they must be morons…
…decided to go ahead with that eight carrier flotilla to the South China Sea.
And the result of it has not been reported in the Western press. Still giving the idea of the American invincibility on the high seas.
Ah. American media is the "window to the world" as described by Washington DC.
Such a pity.
As well as the absolute fiasco that occurred with the Trump eight carrier invasion force that steamed home with it’s tail between it’s legs after confronting China in the South China Sea. Read about it HERE.
This is only the tip of the iceberg
As well as a number of other events that I will not go into detail about. Anyways, all of this pretty much tells me that a hot “shooting” war between China and the USA started in 2020.
Both American and Chinese people have died as a result of it.
The showdown.
And the policy positions of the two belligerents were put on the table for the entire world to see in the meeting on March 2021 in Anchorage, Alaska. And that meeting told the world that war was on-going.
Sure, there were other elements of conflict.
We have the eight viral strains designed to cause starvation inside of China that were propagated by drones. We had the color revolutions in Hong Kong. We had the positioning and build up for action “to save the Uighur Muslims” in Xinjiang, and the efforts to make Taiwan a United States protectorate.
But none of those events involved military forces.
American military were used to hurt China on Chinese soil
The American military forces started using their skills to kill, destroy and create havoc in 2020. In fact, it was precisely American military “boots on the ground” in China, at Wuhan that kicked off the first wave of biological warfare.
And the only reason that it did not erupt into World War III is because of the calm composure of China in the face of the moronic instability of the United States leadership.
But don’t relax yet.
Let’s not forget these words…
The next Fourth Turning could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly.
So with that being said, let’s look at the timing.
The date of 2020 is the Strauss and Howe initial target date for the Climax of the Fourth Turning. But the Crisis Catalyst was supposed to occur in 2005 to have a Climax in 2020.
I have previously argued that since the Crisis Catalyst occurred three years later in 2008, it would launch a Climax in 2023. Now I am not so sure.
I am starting to believe that the Climax hit as planned on 2020. And as a result we are seeing the Strauss and Howe “textbook” results of that Climax.
The only difference is that it is not being reported at all in the American media. Which is surreal, in all the previous Fourth Turning events, the issues were always reported. But the United States is so absolutely fucked up today, that no one really knows anything, and the amount of crime, corruption and sheer incompetence is mind boggling.
So, with all that being said, let’s make it official…
The Fourth Turning Climax hit in 2020
And the next three years to five years will determine the followup events that the crisis started.
Historically, the Crisis would always set the pace of the resulting changes that would follow in the subsequent decades. And there are so many aspects and issues going on that it is difficult to anticipate what to expect.
What can we look forward to?
[1] It could go really, really, REALLY bad…
And when I mean BAD, I mean Baaaaaaaad!
The next Fourth Turning could mark the end of man.
It could be an omnicidal armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly.
But this end, while possible, is not likely.
Human life is not so easily extinguishable.
One conceit of linear thinking is the confidence that we possess such godlike power that—at the mere push of a button—we can obliterate nature, destroy our own seed, and make ourselves the final generations of our species.
Civilized (post-Neolithic) man has endured some 500 generations, prehistoric (fire-using) man perhaps 5,000 generations, Homo Erectus ten times that.
For the next Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection, and bad luck.
Only the worst pessimist can imagine that.
[2] It could change the way the world works.
And if the United States keeps on bearing down and pushing the combined nations of Russia/China/Iran you can well expect to see this…
The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity.
The Western saecular rhythm—which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance—could come to an abrupt terminus. The seventh modern saeculum would be the last.
This too could come from total war, terrible but not final.
There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society.
The “Western Civilization” of Toynbee and the “Faustian Culture” of Spengler would come to the inexorable close their prophesiers foresaw.
A new dark ages would settle in, until some new civilization could be cobbled together from the ruins.
The cycle of generations would also end, replaced by an ancient cycle of tradition (and fixed social roles for each phase of life) that would not allow progress.
As with an omnicide, such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet.
But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.
[3] It could end the USA, but spare the rest of the world.
Which seems to be what the entire globe is hoping for. Few people outside of Washington DC wants America to continue being what it is. That includes most Americans. America is not “balkanized” for nothing. Most people want this “nightmare” to end.
The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation.
It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify.
This nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, Etruria ten, the Soviet Union (perhaps) only one.
Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival.
Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger:
In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a threat in more than one battle.
In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most horrible war in history.
In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed.
In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale.
...
The new saeculum could find America a worse place.
As Paul Kennedy has warned, it might no longer be a “great power.”
Its global stature might be eclipsed by foreign rivals.
Its geography might be smaller, its culture less dominant, its military less effective, its government less democratic, its Constitution less inspiring.
Emerging from its millennial chrysalis, it might evoke nothing like the hope and respect of its “American Century” forbear.
Abroad, people of goodwill and civilized taste might perceive this society as a newly dangerous place.
Or they might see it as decayed, antiquated, an Old New World less central to human progress than we now are.
All this is plausible, and possible, in the natural turning of saecular time.
The items highlighted in BROWNhave already happened.
[4] Or, it could just be a “place holder” in the grand scheme of things.
The aggressive elements inside of Washington DC might retreat, and the same-old would continue in the same-old “well worn” pathways.
Or the Fourth Turning could simply mark the end of the Millennial Saeculum.
Mankind, modernity, and America would all persevere.
Afterward, there would be a new mood, a new High, and a new saeculum. America would be reborn. But, reborn, it would not be the same.
[5] Or,alternatively, things could end up being very, very good.
Alternatively, the new saeculum could find America, and the world, a much better place.
Like England in the Reformation Saeculum, the Superpower America of the Millennial Saeculum might merely be a prelude to a higher plane of civilization.
Its new civic life might more nearly resemble that “shining city on a hill” to which its colonial ancestors aspired.
Its ecology might be freshly repaired and newly sustainable, its economy rejuvenated, its politics functional and fair, its media elevated in tone, its culture creative and uplifting, its gender and race relations improved, its commonalities embraced and differences accepted, its institutions free of the corruptions that today seem entrenched beyond correction.
People might enjoy new realms of personal, family, community, and national fulfillment.
America’s borders might be redrawn around an altered but more cogent geography of public community.
Its influence on world peace could be more potent, on world culture more uplifting.
All this is achievable as well.
But I strongly doubt that such a positive outcome is possible.
Conclusion
As I sit here in a hot May 2021, it appears that scenario number [3] (above) is the most likely scenario.
With the option scenario number [2] (above) still possible.
We can only wait and see.
And these are my thoughts on this matter. If you feel otherwise, you are welcome to posit which of the five scenarios that you believe is possible. But for now, I am strongly placing my bets on scenario number [3].
Do you want more?
You can find more articles related to this in my latest index; A New Beginning. And in it are elements of the old, some elements regarding the transition, and some elements that look towards the future.
As I have repeatedly stated throughout Metallicman, reincarnation is a natural part of our experience as consciousness. We enter and leave the physical realities at will, and it is fairly automatic. It’s really nothing to get all “hot and bothered” about. It’s a normal exercise in consciousness migration.
Let’s look at a normal day to day life.
We naturally cycle in and out of world-lines. We do it at about four Hz. or roughly four world-lines per second. And this movement
Essentially, it works like this, the consciousness constantly cycles in and out of world-lines. Each moment, each cycle, is a new world-line.
We see that, just as our consciousness observes it. We call it “time”.
Each world-line has it’s own future, and it’s own past. Which may or may not diverge from the pasts or (anticipated) futures of your previous experiences.
Sort of like this…
Consciousness travel. You can see that each moment it visits a completely different world-line.
.
And here is how it appears from the point of view of the consciousness. In this next illustration we can see that (from the point of view of the consciousness) each moment in a world-line is a singular world-line with it’s own past, and it’s own future.
As shown here…
Now from a consciousness point of view, this is all very interesting.
When it is inside a world-line, it occupies a physical body. There it enters a “particle” phase. As such it is able to control and actuate the body that it inhabits.
Then, next, once it is outside of the world-line, it enters the “wave” phase and is thus freely moving in the non-physical realms (momentarily).
This cycling, I have covered it elsewhere, is in the form of a sine wave. And it looks a little something like this…
Thus, as is shown above, the consciousness MUST be in particle form for it to actuate a body within a given world line.
And, as such it MUST be in a wave form to move between different world-lines by traveling in the non-physical reality.
Now…
What happens when the physical body dies, and as such, it no longer can support a consciousness? What then?
What happens?
Well, for one thing, the consciousness is “stuck” in a wave form.
For it to continue getting experiences it must enter a world-line with an infant of value that…
Is “empty” has no other consciousness associated with it.
Has a future time and life line that will meet the objectives of the consciousness.
So it can either do one of two things.
Stay in “wave form”.
Enter a new infant body in “particle form”.
And thus we have the interesting tales of reincarnation events. As such, here are some very interesting examples of well-documented reincarnation events.
3-Year-Old Boy Remembers His Past Life, Locates His Body & Identifies The Man Who Murdered Him
Published on April 28, 2017 By Arjun Walia. Found HERE. Edited to fit in this venue, and all credit to the author.
Reincarnation has remained on the fringe of scientific inquiry for a long time, despite a number of scientists urging the mainstream community to research it further — and for good reason.
Decades ago, American astronomer and astrobiologist Carl Sagan said that
“there are three claims in the (parapsychology) field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study,”
with one being
“that young children sometimes report details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.”
This topic falls into the ever-growing study of non-material sciences.
At the end of the nineteenth century, physicists discovered something that could not be explained by classical physics. This led to the development of quantum mechanics.
And of course, quantum mechanics has now proven that the material foundations of our world are not the real foundations we think they are.
Quantum mechanic suddenly introduced the mind into its conceptual structure, because all of the results coming from quantum mechanics suggest that the physical world is no longer the primary or sole component of reality.
“Despite the unrivaled empirical success of quantum theory, the very suggestion that it may be literally true as a description of nature is still greeted with cynicism, incomprehension and even anger.”
– T. Folger, “Quantum Shmantum”; Discover 22:37-43, 2001
The quote below is from Dr. Gary Schwartz, a professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry, and surgery at the University of Arizona. He and a number of other sciences explain these concepts in their Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science:
The ideology of scientific materialism became dominant in academia during the 20th century.
So dominant that a majority of scientists started to believe that it was based on established empirical evidence, and represented the only rational view of the world.
Scientific methods based upon materialistic philosophy have been highly successful in not only increasing our understanding of nature but also in bringing greater control and freedom through advances in technology.
However, the nearly absolute dominance of materialism in the academic world has seriously constricted the sciences and hampered the development of the scientific study of mind and spirituality.
Faith in this ideology, as an exclusive explanatory framework for reality, has compelled scientists to neglect the subjective dimension of human experience.
This has led to a severely distorted and impoverished understanding of ourselves and our place in nature.
When it comes to reincarnation specifically, it directly relates to the study of consciousness — something that Max Plank regarded as “fundamental” in relation to quantum mechanics.
In fact, Eugene Wigner, another Nobel Prize winning scientist/mathematician, once told the world that
“it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics without reference to consciousness.”
The Scientific Study of Reincarnation
University of Virginia psychiatrist Jim Tucker is arguably the world’s leading researcher on this topic, and in 2008, he published a review of cases that were suggestive of reincarnation in the journal Explore.
A typical reincarnation case, described by Jim, includes subjects reporting a past life experience. The interesting thing is that 100% of subjects who report past life remembrance are children.
The average age when they start remembering their past life is at 35 months, and their descriptions of events and experiences from their past life are often extensive and remarkably detailed.
Tucker has pointed out that these children show very strong emotional involvement when they speak about their experiences; some actually cry and beg their parents to be taken to what they say is their previous family.
According to Tucker,
“The subjects usually stop making their past-life statements by the age of six to seven, and most seem to lose the purported memories. This is the age when children start school and begin having more experiences in the current life, as well as when they tend to lose their early childhood memories.”
Roughly 70 percent of the children say they died violent or unexpected deaths in their previous life.
Males account for close to three-quarters of those deaths—almost precisely the same ratio of males who die of unnatural causes in the general population.
More cases are reported in countries where reincarnation is part of the religious culture, but Tucker says there is no correlation between how strong a case is deemed and that family’s beliefs in reincarnation.
One out of five children who report a past life say they recall the intermission, the time between death and birth, although there is no consistent view of what that’s like. Some allege they were in “God’s house,” while others claim they waited near where they died before “going inside” their mother.
In cases where a child’s story has been traced to another individual, the median time between the death of that person and the child’s birth is about 16 months.
Further research by Tucker and others has shown the children generally have above-average IQs and do not possess any mental or emotional disorders beyond average groups of children. None appears to have been dissociating from painful family situations.
Nearly 20 percent of the children studied have scarlike birthmarks or even unusual deformities that closely match marks or injuries the person whose life the child recalls received at or near his or her death.
Most children’s claims generally subside around age 6, coinciding roughly with what Tucker says is the time children’s brains ready themselves for a new stage of development.
This Case
This article, however, focuses on a different case. And it starts with a doctor named Eli Lasch, a prominent physician in Israel who served as a senior consultant in the coordination of health services in the Gaza Strip. He passed away in 2009, but before he did, he was investigating a supposed reincarnation case in which a three-year old boy claimed to have remembered a past life. In this life, he remembered being struck by a big blow to the head with an axe, and having a long, red birthmark on his head.
The present-day boy, whose name remained confidential throughout the entire study, also had a birthmark in the exact same spot, which is interesting because multiple studies, like the one published in Explore, point out how shared birthmarks are common to children who remember their past lives.
The boy’s father and a number of other relatives in the village decided to visit neighboring communities to see if his past life identity could be established and Dr. Lasch was invited to join. On this journey, they visited multiple villages until the boy remembered the right one. He remembered his own first and last name, as well as the first and last name of his murderer.
According to the Institute for the Integration of Science, Intuition, and Spirit. I am not able to retrieve the source, as it appears to have been removed, but I will leave the text here with another reference at the bottom of this quote.
A member of this community, who had heard the boy’s story, said that he had known the man that the boy said that he was in the past lifetime. This man had disappeared 4 years earlier and was never found. It was assumed that this person must have come to some misfortune as it was known that individuals were killed or taken prisoner in the border areas between Israel and Syria for being suspected of being spies.
The group went through the village and at one point the boy pointed out this past life house. Curious bystanders gathered around and suddenly the boy walked up to a man and called him by name. The man acknowledged that the boy correctly named him and the boy then said:
“I used to be your neighbor. We had a fight and you killed me with an ax.”
Dr. Lasch then observed that this man’s face suddenly became white as a sheet. The 3-year-old than stated:
“I even know where he buried my body.”
The boy then led the group, which included the accused murderer, into fields that were located nearby. The boy stopped in front of a pile of stones and reported:
“He buried my body under these stones and the ax over there.”
The boy’s full story has been documented in the book, “Children Who Have Lived Before: Reincarnation Today” by German therapist Trutz Hardo.
Excavation at the spot under the stones revealed the skeleton of an adult man wearing the clothes of a farmer, and on the skull, they observed a linear split consistent with an axe wound.
In 1998, Dr. Lasch related this case history to Trutz Hardo,.
6 Extraordinary Cases Of Kids Who Remember Their Past Lives
University of Virginia psychiatrist Jim Tucker is arguably the world’s leading researcher on this topic, and in 2008, he published a review of cases that were suggestive of reincarnation in the journal Explore.
A typical reincarnation case, described by Jim, includes subjects reporting a past life experience. The interesting thing is that 100 percent of subjects who report past life remembrance are children.
The average age when they start remembering their past life is at 35 months, and their descriptions of events and experiences from their past life are often extensive and remarkably detailed. Tucker has pointed out that these children show very strong emotional involvement when they speak about their experiences; some actually cry and beg their parents to be taken to what they say is their previous family.
According to Tucker:
The subjects usually stop making their past-life statements by the age of six to seven, and most seem to lose the purported memories. This is the age when children start school and begin having more experiences in the current life, as well as when they tend to lose their early childhood memories.
Sam Taylor
Sam Taylor is one child Tucker studied and wrote about. Born 18 months after his paternal grandfather died, he first began recalling details of a past life when he was just over a year old:
When he was 1.5 years old, he looked up as his father was changing his diaper and said, “When I was your age, I used to change your diapers.”
He began talking more about having been his grandfather.
He eventually told details of his grandfather’s life that his parents felt certain he could not have learned through normal means, such as the fact that his grandfather’s sister had been murdered and that his grandmother had used a food processor to make milkshakes for his grandfather every day at the end of his life.(source)
Pretty remarkable, isn’t it?
A Midwestern Toddler Recalls Writing Gone With The Wind
From the time he was two years old, a Midwestern child named Lee insisted he had another house and another mommy. By the age of three, he began saying he was born on June 26 rather than his actual birthday, June 21. Lee claimed his middle name was Coe, he wrote movies for a living, and had a daughter named Jennifer. His sister asked him how old he was when he died and he promptly replied, “Forty-eight.”
Lee’s curious parents relayed the titles of several movies to Lee, asking if he had written them. When they mentioned Gone With the Wind, Lee became enthusiastic. He eagerly claimed he wrote the film.
After a quick Google search, Lee’s parents learned the writer of Gone With the Wind was named Sidney Coe Howard. Howard was born June 26, had a daughter named Jennifer, and passed away at forty-eight. As these details of Coe’s life were unknown to Lee’s parents, it’s unclear how he knew them. This leaves reincarnation as a possible explanation.
A Six Year Old Claimed To Be The Reincarnation Of Nearby Family Man
At the age of one-and-a-half, Nazih Al-Danaf of Lebanon shocked his parents. He declared, “I am not small, I am big.” He insisted he had many weapons, including grenades, and lived in a nearby village.
As time went on, Al-Danaf continually requested to be taken to his old home in Qaberchamoun, about 10 miles away from his village. When he was six years old, his parents granted this request and Al-Danaf located Najdiyah Khaddage’s home. Khaddage spoke with Al-Danaf at length and became convinced he was the reincarnation of her husband, Fuad Assad Khaddage. She was astounded when Al-Danaf answered her questions correctly. He remembered who built the foundation of their home, the specifics of an accident when she dislocated her shoulder, and an incident when their daughter became ill by ingesting medicine.
Even more astonishing? When Al-Danaf’s alleged former wife invited him into her home, he quickly ran to a cupboard in search of his weapons. This was the exact cupboard where her deceased husband had kept his guns and grenades.
Ryan – A Boy From The Midwest
When Ryan Hammons was 4 years old, he began directing imaginary movies. Shouts of “Action!” often echoed from his room.But the play became a concern for Ryan’s parents when he began waking up in the middle of the night screaming and clutching his chest, saying he dreamed his heart exploded when he was in Hollywood.
His mother, Cyndi, asked his doctor about the episodes.
Night terrors, the doctor said. He’ll outgrow them. Then one night, as Cyndi tucked Ryan into bed, Ryan suddenly took hold of Cyndi’s hand.“Mama,” he said. “I think I used to be someone else.”He said he remembered a big white house and a swimming pool. It was in Hollywood, many miles from his Oklahoma home. He said he had three sons, but that he couldn’t remember their names. He began to cry, asking Cyndi over and over why he couldn’t remember their names.“I really didn’t know what to do,” Cyndi said. “I was more in shock than anything.
He was so insistent about it.
After that night, he kept talking about it, kept getting upset about not being able to remember those names.
I started researching the Internet about reincarnation. I even got some books from the library on Hollywood, thinking their pictures might help him. I didn’t tell anyone for months.”One day, as Ryan and Cyndi paged through one of the Hollywood books, Ryan stopped at a black-and-white still taken from a 1930s movie, Night After Night.
Two men in the center of the picture were confronting one another. Four other men surrounded them. Cyndi didn’t recognize any of the faces, but Ryan pointed to one of the men in the middle.“Hey Mama,” he said. “That’s George. We did a picture together.” His finger then shot over to a man on the right, wearing an overcoat and a scowl. “That guy’s me. I found me!”
-UVA Magazine
Ryan’s story began when he was 4 years old, when he was experiencing frequent, horrible nightmares. Once he turned five, he made an announcement to his mother. He told her,
“I used to be somebody else.”
He would often talk about “going home” to Hollywood and would beg his mother to take him there. He told her detailed stories about meeting stars like Rita Hayworth, dancing in Broadway productions, and working for an agency where people would frequently change their names. He even remembered that the name of the street he used to live on had the word “rock” in it.
Ryan’s mother Cyndi said that
“his stories were so detailed and they were so extensive, that it just wasn’t like a child could have made it up.”
Cyndi decided to check out some books about Hollywood from her local library, thinking that maybe something inside would catch her son’s attention, and it did.
Cyndi said that once she found the below picture — of the man Ryan claims to have been in his past life — everything changed.
They decided to seek Tucker’s help, who took on the case and started his research.
After only approximately two weeks, a Hollywood film archivist was able to confirm the identity of the man in the photo. The picture was from a film titled “Night After Night,” and the man was Marty Martyn, who had been a movie extra and then later became a powerful Hollywood agent before passing away in 1964.
The book didn’t provide any names of the actors pictured, but Cyndi quickly confirmed that the man Ryan said was “George" in the photo was indeed a George—George Raft, an all but forgotten film star from the 1930s and 1940s.
Still, she couldn’t identify the man Ryan said had been him.Cyndi wrote Tucker, whom she found through her online research, and included the photo.
Eventually it ended up in the hands of a film archivist, who, after weeks of research, confirmed the scowling man’s name: Martin Martyn, an uncredited extra in the film.Tucker hadn’t shared that discovery with the Hammons family when he traveled to their home a few weeks later. Instead, he laid out black-and-white photos of four women on the kitchen table. Three of them were random.Tucker asked Ryan, “Do any of these mean anything to you?”Ryan studied the pictures. He pointed to one. She looks familiar, he said.It was Martin Martyn’s wife.
Martyn had in fact danced on Broadway, worked at an agency where stage names were often created for new clients, traveled overseas to Paris, and lived at 825 North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills.
These were all details that Ryan was able to communicate to Tucker before they learned the identity of who he described; for example, Ryan knew that the address had “Rox” in it.
Ryan was also able to recall how many children Martyn had and how many times he was married.
More remarkable still is the fact that Ryan knew Martyn had two sisters, but Martyn’s own daughter did not.
Ryan also remembers an African-American maid; Marty and his wife employed several. These are just a few of 55 incredible facts that Ryan can remember from his previous life as Marty Martyn, though as he ages, his memories become increasingly dim.
The meeting later between Ryan and Martyn’s daughter didn’t go well. Ryan shook her hand then hid behind Cyndi for the rest of the time. Later he told his mother the woman’s “energy” had changed. Cyndi explained that people change when they grow up.
“I don’t want to go back [to Hollywood],”
Ryan said.
“I always want to keep this family.”
In the weeks that followed, Ryan spoke less about Hollywood. Tucker says that often happens when children meet the family of someone they claimed to have been. It seems to validate their memories, making them less intense.
“I think they see that no one is waiting for them in the past,”
Tucker says.
“Some of them get sad about it, but ultimately they accept it and they turn their attention more fully to the present. They get more involved in experiencing this life, which, of course, is what they should do.”
A Child’s Birth Marks Match A Bicyclist’s Deadly Injuries
Purnima Ekanayake of Sri Lanka was born with unusual birthmarks dotting her lower ribs and chest. At a young age, she began speaking of a past life. After a school trip to a temple 145 miles away, Ekanayake insisted she lived in the town across the river from the temple. She claimed she was once a male incense maker who died in a traffic accident.
Ekanayake’s father traveled with his brother-in-law to the town in question, Kelaniya. They asked around about local incense makers and found the name Jinadasa. Jinadasa had been an incense maker who died when he was hit by a bus while riding his bicycle. Ekanayake’s family took her to Jinadasa’s home, where she was able to identify his wife and daughter and name the school Jinadasa attended.
Ekanayake’s family had no prior contact or connections with Jinadasa’s family. It is difficult to explain how she got such specific information correct. Then, there were the birthmarks. Jinadasa’s autopsy report showed several fractures and bruises from the accident that ran along his lower ribs and left side.
An Elderly Man Shocked Archaeologists With His Knowledge Of An Ancient City
For his entire life, Arthur Flowerdew was haunted with inexplicable and vivid memories of a city surrounded by a desert and a temple carved into a cliff. One day, while watching a BBC documentary on television, he saw the city of Petra, Jordan. To his amazement, the city matched the one in his head.
After Flowerdew shared his story with several people, BBC reporters contacted him asking to put his story on television. Several archeologists flew to Petra with Flowerdew. He recognized landmarks with ease, including sites that had not been excavated yet. When presented with an ancient device, the purpose of which had baffled scholars for years, he offered a plausible explanation regarding its use. After seeing a guard station, Flowerdew recalled that he had died there when he was stabbed with a spear.
The experts who accompanied Flowerdew believed his claims of reincarnation, doubting someone would be able to fake or fabricate the breadth of knowledge he displayed. Flowerdew maintained he had never studied the city previously and only heard of it upon seeing it on television. While Flowerdew could possibly have withheld information regarding his education, many believe this is a true reincarnation story.
A Retired Fire Chief Felt An Emotional Link To A Civil War General
When retired fire chief Jeffrey Keene and his wife vacationed in Maryland, he was caught off guard when visiting a Civil War battlefield called Sunken Road. Keene became inexplicably emotional as he entered the field, to the point he thought he may be suffering a heart attack. While the physical pain passed, he felt an uncanny connection to the area.
Later, he recounted the incident to a psychic at a party. She asked if he believed in reincarnation. He felt the instinctive urge to say the words, “Not yet.”
While reading a Civil War magazine in his home, he found an article about a Civil War general identified as General Gordon. Gordon had fought in Sunken Road during the Battle of Antietam. During this battle, he was best remembered for repetitively shouting the words, “Not yet.”
Upon researching Gordon’s life, Keene found more connections between himself and Gordon. Keene had marks on this body similar to wounds Gordon suffered in war. On Keen’s 30th birthday, he was emitted to the hospital with a terrible pain in his jaw. When Gordon was 30, he was shot in the face.
Swedish Woman Claims To Be The Reincarnation Of Anne Frank
Barbro Karlén was born in Sweden in 1954. From the time she could talk, Karlén began telling her parents strange stories about someone named Anne Frank. Karlén claimed she was Anne Frank, that she had nightmares of men kicking in the door of her home and taking her away.
Her parents were perplexed, not least because they had no idea Anne Frank was a real person. Frank died in 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after Nazis discovered her and her family hiding in an attic in Amsterdam. They were trying to avoid persecution for being Jewish.
Karlén’s parents took her to Amsterdam when she was 10 years old. She quickly led them to Frank’s house with no directions, correctly identified a spot on the wall where Frank had hung photos of movie stars, and noted that the steps were different than she remembered them. All of this was enough to finally make her parents believe she really was the reincarnation of Anne Frank, and she’s been writing books about her experience ever since.
Chanai Choomalaiwong
Chanai is a boy from Thailand, who, when he was three years old, began saying that he had been a teacher named Bua Kai who had been shot and killed as he rode his bike to school.
He pleaded and begged to be taken to Bua Kai’s parents, who he felt were his own parents.
He knew the village where they lived, and eventually convinced his grandmother to take him there.
According to the research:
His grandmother reported that after they got off the bus, Chanai led her to a house where an older couple lived. Chanai appeared to recognize the couple, who were the parents of Bua Kai Lawnak, a teacher who had been shot and killed on the way to school five years before Chanai was born.
The fascinating thing is that Kai and Chanai had something in common.
Kai, who was shot from behind, had small, round wounds on the back of his head, typical of an entry wound, and larger exit wounds on his forehead; Chanai was born with two birthmarks, a small, round birthmark on the back of his head, and a larger, irregularly shaped one towards the front.
The Case of P.M
P.M was a boy whose half brother had died from neuroblastoma 12 years before his birth.
The half brother was diagnosed after he began limping, and then suffered a pathological fracture on his left tibia. He underwent a biopsy of a nodule on his scalp, just above his right ear, and received chemotherapy through a central line in his right external jugular vein. At the time of his death he was two years old, and blind in his left eye.
P.M was born with three birthmarks that match the lesions on his half brother, as well as with a swelling 1cm in diameter above his right ear and a dark, slanting mark on the lower right anterior surface of his neck.
He also had what’s known as a ‘corneal leukoma,’ which caused him to be virtually blind in his left eye.
As soon as P.M. started to walk, he did so with a limp, sparing his left side, and at around the age of 4.5 years he spoke to his mother about wanting to return to the family’s previous home, describing it with great accuracy. He also spoke of his brother’s scalp surgery even though he had never been told of it before.
Two Sisters Killed In A Car Accident Were Reincarnated As Twins
John and Florence Pollock were devastated when their twin daughters, Joanna and Jacqueline, died in a car accident on May 5, 1957. The following year, they were thrilled to hear they were expecting and, once again, Florence was carrying twins. The twins, Gillian and Jennifer, were born identical except for Jennifer’s birthmarks. She had a birthmark on her waist, similar to a birthmark Jacqueline had, and a birthmark on her forehead that resembled one of Jacqueline’s scars.
John and Florence moved away from their old home when their daughters were three months old. John and Florence told Gillian and Jennifer very little about their late sisters, but the girls seemed to share Joanna and Jacqueline’s memories. They would request old toys that had belonged to the deceased twins, recognized landmarks when traveling to their parents’ former home, and were inexplicably terrified of cars. Upon seeing oncoming traffic, they would shriek, “The car is coming to get us!”
Luckily, by the age of five, these frightening memories mostly faded away. The girls went on to live relatively normal adult lives. However, their story is still frequently cited as evidence of reincarnation.
Kendra Carter
When Kendra began swimming lessons at the age of 4, she immediately developed an emotional attachment to her coach.
Shortly after she started her lessons, she began saying that the coach’s baby had died and that the coach had been sick and pushed her baby out.
Kendra’s mother was always at her lessons, and when she asked Kendra how she knew these things, her reply was,
“I’m the baby that was in her tummy.”
Kendra went on to describe an abortion, and her mother later found out that the coach had indeed had an abortion 9 years before Kendra was even born:
Kendra became happy and bubbly when she was with the coach but quiet otherwise, and her mother let her spend more and more time with the coach until she was staying with her three nights a week.
Eventually, the coach had a falling out with Kendra’s mother and cut off contact with the family.
Kendra then went into a depression and did not speak for 4.5 months.
The coach reestablished more limited contact at that point, and Kendra slowly began talking again and participating in activities. (source)
A Chicago Fire Victim Was Reincarnated As A Five-Year-Old Boy
At first, Erica Ruehlman laughed off her five-year-old son Luke’s odd tendency to call toys and objects “Pam.” She was also unconcerned by his comments about having once been a girl. He would say he had black hair when he was a girl, or that he wore the same earrings as his mom when he was a girl. Out of curiosity, Erica eventually asked Luke who Pam was.
“I was,” he said, “Well, I used to be, but I died and I went up to heaven. I saw God and then, eventually, God pushed me back down and when I woke up I was a baby and you named me Luke.”
After pressing him for more details, Luke told his mother he lived in Chicago, took the train a lot, and died in a fire. After mentioning his death, Luke made a hand motion indicating someone jumping out a window. When Erica punched the information into a search engine, she discovered a news story about a fire in the Paxton Hotel in Chicago. In March of 1993, 19 people died in a fire at the building and a woman, Pam Robinson, perished when she jumped out a window.
Erica couldn’t explain how Luke would have known about a fire in Chicago. He had never been to the city, and she never discussed it with him. While the haunting story of Pam Robinson could be a coincidence, it was enough to make Erica believe.
James Leininger
At the time of this case, James was a 4 year old boy from Louisiana. And he believed he was once a World War II pilot who had been shot down over Iwo Jima, an island that the United States fought to capture in 1945.
His parents first realized this when James started to have nightmares, waking up and screaming “airplane crash” and “plane on fire.”
He knew details about the WWII aircraft that would be impossible for a youngster to know. For example, when his mother referred to an object on the bottom of a model plane as a bomb, she was corrected by James, who informed her that it was a ‘drop tank.’
In anther instance, he and his parents were watching a documentary, and the narrator called a Japanese plane a Zero, when James insisted that it was Tony. In both cases, James turned out to be right.
James also insisted that in his previous life, he had flown off a ship named the Natoma, which, as the Leiningers discovered, was a WW2 aircraft carrier (USS Natoma Bay).
James said that his previous name was also James, and shockingly, in the USS Natoma Bay squadron, there was a pilot names James Huston who had been killed in action over the Pacific ocean.
Dr. Tucker obtained additional documents for several of James Leininger’s statements, and they were made before anyone in the family had even heard of James Huston or the USS Natoma Baby.
Ask yourself, how could a two-year-old in Louisiana remember being a World War II pilot shot down over the Pacific?
The biggest skeptic of this case was the boy’s father, who remarked that he was..
“the original skeptic, but the information James gave us was so striking and unusual. If someone wants to look at the facts and challenge them, they’re welcome to examine everything we have.” (source)
A Grandfather Was Reincarnated As His Own Grandson
University of Virginia psychiatrist Jim Tucker, who studies reincarnation professionally, met a boy identified as Sam who he believes to be the reincarnation of his own grandfather. Until he was four years old, Sam had never seen a picture of his grandfather. After his grandmother’s passing, his parents brought out an old photo album. Upon seeing his grandfather’s car, he exclaimed, “That’s my car!”
It would be easy to attribute this to an overactive imagination. This is what Sam’s Baptist mother did at first, as her religion does not believe in reincarnation. However, she became a believer after she asked Sam if he remembered anything else from his past life. He said his sister had been “turned into a fish” by bad men.
Sam’s mother was astounded. His grandfather’s sister had been murdered and her body was dumped in a river. Due to the frightening nature of the story, Sam’s parents never told him about his great aunt’s murder.
Mahatma Gandhi Investigated A Girl’s Reincarnation Claims
Shanti Devi of Delhi, India, was born in 1926 and barely talked until she was four years old. She then began insisting she lived with her husband and son in a town called Mathura, where she had died 10 days after giving birth. Eventually, a teacher in Devi’s school asked for her former husband’s name and she replied, “Pandit Kedarnath Chaube.” The teacher identified a man of this name in Mathura and wrote him a letter.
Chaube confirmed his wife, Lugdi, died during childbirth nine years prior. When Chaube traveled to meet Shanti, he introduced himself using his older brother’s name. Shanti immediately caught the bluff and recognized Chaube as her husband. She recalled details of Lugdi’s life, such as Kedarnath’s favorite food and how Lugdi bathed in a well in their courtyard. She also chastised Chaube for remarrying, as he had promised Lugdi he would not.
Mahatma Gandhi eventually heard of her story. He met with Devi and set up a committee of 15 people to evaluate her claims. The committee, surprisingly, could not debunk the story.
A Nice Info Graphic
Everyone has opinions on how the reincarnation process works. Here’s Tucker’s opinions and his graphics to support them.
And
What Happens When We Die? Where Does “Consciousness” Go?
The amount of research that’s emerged in the fields of parapsychology (ESP, telepathy, remote viewing), quantum physics, reincarnation, near death experiences, out of body experiences, consciousness, and non-material science in general is truly overwhelming.
If you want to learn more about these topics, you can sift through our Metallicman website, as we’ve published countless articles in this area, or visit places like the Institute of Noetic Sciences and start your research there.
Keep in mind that we are soul…
… but your thinking and your being is consciousness.
And as such it is NORMAL for you to go from particle to wave and back again over, and over and over again. And when your physical body can no longer support a consciousness you go elsewhere.
The reasons behind the decision process and where you eventually go depend on many factors. factors that we will not go into now. Just know that you are soul, and your life is what you make of it. Best regards.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
This is a MAJestic post. In this article I look at some of the aspects of operations and how it impacted my life within the MWI.
This article opens up an entire “can of worms”.
You see, nothing is like Hollywood movies. It’s not some lone brave hero with no background, relationships, or friendships. We all have relationships, families, friends, pleasures, pastimes and interests.
And when you join any program (not just MAJestic) that just doesn’t disappear.
You remain who you are. Your interests stay the same. Your family stays the same, and your relationships stay the same.
This is true regardless to what happens to you on a personal level. You just don’t chuck it all away when you “sign on the dotted line”, enter into a facility, or start interacting with other people, species or events.
This is very true.
And for me (for instance), I would be involved in some calibration training exercises with a <redacted> discussing and going through a <redacted> procedure, yet at the end of the day, I would go home. I would fill my motorcycle with gas, pick up some Betamax tapes to watch, and grab a bucket of KFC chicken and a 30-pack of Budweiser beer.
Your life doesn’t change. You just add experiences, events and knowledge to what you already possess.
KFC in Ridgecrest, CA, right outside the Main Gate to China Lake NWC.
Relationships are more than what you think
Everyone realizes what “love” is, and the bond that two people have when they are together and when they get married. It’s a bond; an understanding, a shared behavior, and a degree of comfort.
But what people do not realize is that on the quantum level this bond is a very important two-way communication stream. It’s a very strong and powerful communication channel.
Yes, it is complex, and yes it is interesting. And Yes, I am going to get really “deep” into this subject on two particular levels.
Level one is the idea about “quantum shadows” being your loved ones and family members.
And …
Level Two is the idea of what it was like for me to go through all these “slides” and “anchoring” events as part of MAJestic. All the while still maintaining a quantum level bond and connection with my spouse and my family.
Level One – Anchoring activity for MAJ while conducting “slides”
As I have explained elsewhere, every moment that your consciousness occupies a world-line, it is (for the most part) alone. All those “other” people are just empty shells and they really don’t have the same kind of consciousness density as you have.
It’s easy to misunderstand this. It’s easy to believe that we occupy a singular lonely world. But that’s not really the case.
And, yes, I have used this simplification in my early posts when introducing this concept.
It’s just a simplification for our minds to understand a very complex reality. Which is that consciousness is not a point, a blob, or a ghostly vaporous something. It is a shared construction, established by your soul, that operates on a multitude of world-lines simultaneously.
And when you are upon any given specific world-line, what that means is that your consciousness density for YOU at that point in time is the dominant density within that particular world-line. All the other consciousness’s within that world-line have a much lighter and trivial density.
It’s not exactly zero.
But it’s not as dominant as yours is.
Now that you understand this point then you can understand how the family bonding occurs. Your particular consciousness bonds, or sets up a quantum line of communication, with other consciousness’s within that particular world-line. The density does not matter.
All that matters is that one consciousness is connected to another.
So…
When I am going through rapid world-line cycling and slides, my wife and my pets seemingly go through it with me. I am with my wife, and my cat is on a chair. A slide occurs and suddenly I am wearing white socks with these big black dots on them (do not laugh, it actually occurred). My wife is still there, except that she has much longer hair, and my cat looks up at me inquiringly. (as if to say, “what?”)
But they actually don’t travel with me. They appear to. But their thoughts and memories are unaware of the transposition of realities.
Are you confused?
It looks that way because when I arrive at the new world-line their quantum shadows are there. They seem, they appear, to go with me.
And since each quantum shadow has a trivial level of consciousness, the bonding methodology remains intact. You still love your spouse, and your pets no matter how strange the rest of the world-line appears to you.
So you can go through a “slide” and you can be in a really deep dive.
The world around you can be very unusual. Like having green(!) chili sauce for your hotdog (also really happened. But at least on this world-line ketchup is the normal red color that we have grown to love), with odd colored deep fried yams instead of French Fries.
And with this would be comparable changes to the physical appearance (and memories) of your spouse.
In my case, she might be shorter, or taller. She might have different colored hair, or eyes, and a different figure entirely. But she was still my spouse. I was always able to recognize her as that. No matter how strange she appeared to me.
Different body shapes for women, simplified and illustrated.
I attribute that to the conscious bonding mechanism of quantum entanglement between closely associated consciousness’s.
And the same is true with my pets as well. Though, seriously, I swear that my cats knew what was going on all the time with me. They would sort of look at me with this expression “What? Again!”
And you all know that things can really change.
Cars can change, houses can change, entire landscapes can change, and along with all of that are entire histories and the past. Not only of the body that your consciousness occupies, but also of the entire world-line.
And yes, mental processes as well.
You spouse might be a crack genius one moment, and then a slide will turn her into a simpleton, with no education or understandings.
One minute you are on a world-line where Gerald Ford is President, and the next moment your world-line has Ross Perot as President. And yes, it did happen, and sometimes it can be extraordinarily confusing. Not to mention extremely frustrating.
On a personal note that I can tell you that while my wife would change from slide to slide, it was never far too radical. Or in other words, she didn’t go from a “Whoopi Goldberg” to a Alessandra Ambrosio during a slide.
I was always able to recognize her.
But that being said, that actually could have happened. She could have looked like Whoopi and then ended up looking like Alessandra. She could have. It’s just that in my experience, she didn’t.
That doesn’t mean that she didn’t have cosmetic surface differences. Sometimes her skin color was different, the hair style and color would be different, and yes, her body would change. Sometimes rather drastically. Yet, though all of this, she “felt” right.
I well remember one time there was a slide and while we were having sex (it happened at all times, I had no control of it) she ended up becoming shorter. Like really shorter. Maybe three inches shorter (9 cm). But her boobs got much bigger, so it was one of those cases of a little of this, and a little of that, you know.
And don’t ask me how I dealt with it.
I am a human, when you start to experience changes, you learn to adapt to them. And so I did. I adapted.
This is true for my cats, and my dogs. They might have physically changed, but I was immediately able to identify who they were. Our internal relationships were not altered by the MWI taskings. Though it could be frustrating. I once was used to having my dog go out for walks with me, and he would keep close by, then there would be a slide, and I would need to take him out of a leash each time, because otherwise he would run away.
So, what I am trying to say is that everything is inner-connected. You don’t go from being a middle-class noob driving an average car, to suddenly living in a high-rise penthouse with a movie-starlet in your bed. All slides happened for reasons, and when I was involved in the slides, the changes were always in equal amounts of good with bad, new changes with old familiars, and situations that resembled where I departed from.
Level Two – The relationships
Now, as I have stated, this bond; this connection between my consciousness and the consciousness’s of my family, loved ones and pets did not change.
It still existed.
And because it did, I was able to identify them and their association with me. This was true no matter how messed up the rest of the world appeared to me, to be.
Yet…
Bonds and quantum level communication is a two-way street. Even though my wife had no idea what was going on, aside from what I told her, she was able to “feel” or sense changes.
In fact, she was an unusually sensitive person. She possessed this nearly 6th or 7th sense that at times amazed me. For instance, she knew that the earthquake in San Francisco was going to occur. She knew what I was doing when I was at the other end of the world on business travel. She even knew if I had indigestion if I was in a hotel room miles away. She knew, in great detail, if I was being a very “bad boy”. And she knew if I was missing her and my little family.
And strangely she could sense when I went to the bathroom, and would always, absolutely always, call me when I left my desk to go to the toilet. (She didn’t realize that this was going on, but it drove me nuts. And in those days, we didn’t have cell phones.)
She was special like that.
Because even though the world-lines changed, and the bonds did not, the bonds themselves were altered by the environmental changes.
And she could sense this.
So she would compensate.
Her brain, affected by what her “quantum shadow” was at the time, would also create changes in the bonding between us individuals. And that slowly drove her crazy.
She started to manifest strange behaviors around 1987.
Was diagnosed with Schizoaffective personality in the early 1990’s, and exhibited full schizophrenia around 1998.
Which is one of the reasons why I was so very upset by the comments by “Osiander” on 30APR21.
"It seems to me to be hearing the thought stream of a schizophrenic person."
A person with this illness is very sick indeed, and their loved ones have a herculean task in dealing with them, on top of everything else.
For me, personally, not only did I need to endure the slides via MAJestic, but I held some very competitive and hard-charging technical positions in the industry. It was awful.
You are making a presentation in a meeting, you are standing in front of the white-board, and the secretary breaks into the room with a phone call. It's the hospital and my wife tried to kill herself, and they needed me to go to the hospital immediately and sign the necessary papers. So I would need to excuse myself from the meeting, and run off to the emergency room at the hospital, and sign the necessary papers to put her under observation and then into the hospital for treatment. Sometimes as short as a few weeks, but towards the end of the 1990's lasting months inside a high-security ward.
Not a fun life.
And add that to the fact that the role I had was not changing. I had to deal through all the slides and changes while everyone else just lived their normal day-to-day life. Ugh!
In the world-lines, they (the world-line itself) always seemed to adjust to our situations.
Not the other way around.
And things changed.
The past would change each time we went though a slide.
Not, typically big changes. But all those little details that can add up to a very fundamentally strange life.
When we first met, her family were normal, middle class. Then over the slides and jumps, things started to change. Her family history migrated to lower class. And then her family started to have “a past”, and a history of mental illnesses. Where earlier there wasn’t any.
And indeed she was having a hard go at it. If I was involved in a deep-dive, you can pretty much guarantee that she would suffer the consequence for in on some way, one way or the other.
New subject.
The fantasies
All men have these fantasies of encountered strange, interesting and fun women and having sex with them.
The porn industry isn’t a billion dollar industry for nothing.
And if you fully understand what I am relating you can see that there is this real distinct possibility that this kind of thing can seemingly happen when you are involved in a slide.
But I can tell you that while there is a certain element of that that POSSIBLY could occur, it just never materialized in the way that you would it that it would. At least not in my situation.
My wife was always my wife.
She might look thin and tall, or short and round, but she was always my wife. You immediately recognize her as “the wife”.
Though she might be tall and thin, or short and round. She was always easily identifiable to me as my wife, my spouse and I immediately knew her by close proximity “feeling”, not by visual confirmation.
When the alarm went off in the morning, you woke up with your wife. Regardless of how she looked, the length of her hair, the colors of her eyes, or the way she was built. She was your spouse for good or for bad.
I will admit that there is a certain excitement having sex with a spouse that one day looks like an athletic gymnast, and the next day looks like someone who lounges on the sofa eating bon-bons, and then the day after that was a prissy doll-faced scold. But the bonding of family members goes far deeper than the physical appearance, and that I can tell you (first hand) is really the fundamental case.
In fact, during really crazy times, when the cycling was “off the charts”, all I really wanted to do is sort of get back to the woman who I married, not what ever quantum shadow she was at that particular time.
So much for the fantasy. Eh?
However, for the record, for the vast majority of the time we were married she was always attractive and upscale in that particular area. This was the result of many things that are too involved to get into at this time.
It’s like all those fancy promotions of the life of the “jet set” businessmen. The people that travel three or five times a week, always flying to one city or to the other.
It looks so glamorous and exciting.
The life of the “jet set” businessmen.
But as someone who actually did it, nope, it’s something else altogether different.
Truthfully, it’s a pain in the ass and all you want is a nice home-cooked meal, a rest on your couch, and maybe some time in the backyard with your family. The life of a “road warrior” is not fun.
It sucks.
It’s mostly a world of lonely restaurants, airports, rental cars, and hotel-rooms.
This was me. High tech road warrior.
That’s the way life is.
How you picture something is usually not the way it actually is.
So what am I saying?
Look, if you are able to conduct prayer campaigns, you can navigate the MWI successfully and end up with the kind of life that you desire.
And if you have a role, such as I have had, where you have zero navigation control, you can still grasp the reigns of power and steer your life in the direction that you want. You just need to alter the programming. As I did in ADC Pine Bluff.
What ever you do, just remember that we are all connected together.
For you to navigate you must be aware of your interpersonal relationships and then leverage them for mutual satisfaction. NEVER discount the interpersonal relationships that you are involved in. They have a great deal of influence on how your desires and wishes manifest.
In the meantime, as best as you can… just enjoy that life that you are living right now. It’s a blessing that might not come your way again.
Do you want more?
I have more posts like this in my MAJestic Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
Here is a nice story to get your mind off of whatever it might be on right now. Please relax, fix yourself a nice coffee, tea, or beer… get into your most comfortable chair, and relax.
MARS IS HEAVEN!
by Ray Bradbury
The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm. In it were seventeen men, including a captain.
The crowd at the Ohio field had shouted and waved their hands up into the sunlight, and the rocket bad bloomed out great flowers of beat and cobs and run away into space on the third voyage to Mars!
Now it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men within it had been battered,, thrown about, sickened, made well again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars swing up under them.
“Mars! Mars! Good old Mars, here we are!” cried Navigator Lustig.
“Good old Mars!” said Samuel Hinkston, archaeologist.
“Well,” said Captain John Black.
The ship landed softly. on a lawn of green grass. Outside, upon the lawn, stood an iron deer. Further up the lawn, a tall brown Victorian house sat in the quiet sunlight, all covered with scrolls and rococo, its windows made of blue and pink and yellow and green colored glass. Upon the porch were hairy geraniums and an old swing which was hooked into the porch ceiling and which now swung back and forth, back and forth, in a little breeze.
At the top of the house was a cupola with diamond, leaded-glass windows, and a dunce-cap roof! Through the front window you could see an ancient piano with yellow keys and a piece of music titled Beautiful Ohio sitting on the music rest.
Around the rocket in four directions spread the little town, green and motionless in the Martian spring, There were white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church steeples with golden bells silent in them.
The men in the rocket looked out and saw this. Then they looked at one another and then they looked out again. They held on~ to each other’s elbows, suddenly unable to breathe, it seemed. Their faces grew pale and they blinked constantly, running from glass port to glass port of the ship.
“I’ll be damned,” whispered Lustig, rubbing his face with his numb fingers, his eyes wet. “Ill be thinned, damned, damned.’~
“It can~t be, it just can’t be,” said Samuel Hinkston.
“Lord,” said Captain John Black.
There was a call from the chemist. “Sir, the atmosphere is fine for
breathing, sir.” –
Black turned slowly. “Are you sure?’
“No doubt of it, sir.”
“Then we’ll go. out,” said Lustig.
“Lord, yes,” said Samuel Hinkston.
“Hold on,” said Captain John Black. “Just a moment, Nobody gave any orders.”
“But, sir-.-”
“Sir, nothing. How do we know what this is?”
“We know what it is, sir,” said the chemist. “It’s a small town with good air in it, sir.”
“And it’s a small town the like of Earth towns,” said Samuel Hinkston,
the archaeologist. “Incredible. it~ can’t be, but it is.”
Captain John Black looked at him, idly. “Do you think that the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate and evolve in the same way, Hinkston?”
“I wouldn’t have thought so, sir.”
Captain Black stood by the port. “Look out there. The geraniums. A specialized plant. That specific variety has only been known on Earth for fifty years. Think of the thousands of years of time it takes to evolve plants. Then tell me if it is logical that the Martians should have: one, leaded glass windows; two, cupolas; three, porch swings; four, an instrument that looks like, a . piano and probably is a piano; and, five, if you look closely, . if a Martian composer would have published a piece of music titled, strangely enough, Beautiful Ohio. All of which means that we have an Ohio River here on Marst”
“It is quite strange, sir.”
“Strange, hell, it’s absolutely impossible, and I suspect the whole bloody shooting setup. Something’s wrong here, and I’m not leaving the ship until I know what it is.”
“Oh, sir,” said Lustig.
“Dam it,” said Samuel Hinkston. “Sir, I want to investigate this at first hand. It may be that there are similar patterns of thought, movement, civilization on every planet in our system. We may be on the threshold of the great psychological and metaphysical discovery In our time, sir, don’t you think?”
“I’m willing to wait a moment,” said Captain. John Black. – “It may be, sir, that we are looking upon a phenomenon that, for the first time, would absolutely prove the existence of a God, sir.”
“There are many people who are of good faith without such proof, Mr. Hinkston.”
“I’m one myself, sir. But certainly a thing like this, out there,” said Hinkston, “could not occur without divine intervention, sir. It fills me with such terror and elation I’ don’t know whether to laugh or cry, sir.”
“Do neither,. then, until we know what we’re up against.”
“Up against, sir?” inquired Lustig. “I see that we’re up against nothing.
It’s a good quiet, green town, much like the one I was born in, and I like the looks of It.”
“When were you born, Lustig?” –
– “In- 1910, sfr.”
“That makes you fifty years old, now, doesn’t it?”
“This being 1960, yes, sir.”
– “And you, Hinkston?”
“1920, sir. In Illinois. And this looks swell to me, sir.”
“This couldn’t be Heaven,” said the captain, ironically. “Though, I must admit, it looks peaceful and cool, and pretty much like Green Bluff, where I was born, in 1915.”
lie looked at the chemist. “The air’s all right, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
‘Well, then, tell you what we’ll do. Lustig, you and Ilinkston and I will fetch ourselves out to look this town over. The other 14 men will stay aboard ship. If’ anything untoward happens, lift ‘the Ship ‘and get the hell out, do you bear what I say, Craner?”
“Yes, sir. The hell out we’ll go, sir. Leaving you?”,
“A loss of three men’s better than a whole ship. If something bad happens get back to Earth and warn the next Rocket, that’s Lingle’s Rocket, I think, which will be completed and ready to take off some time around next Christmas, what he has to meet up with. If there’s something hostile about Mars we certainly want the next expedition to be well armed.”
“So are we, sir. We’ve got a regular arsenal with us.”
“Tell the ‘men to stand by the guns, then, as. Lustig and Hinkston and I go out,”
“Right, sir.”
“Come along, Lustig, Hinkston.”
The three men walked together, down through the levels of the ship.
It was a beautiful spring day. A robin sat on a blossoming apple tree and sang continuously. Showers of petal snow sifted down when the wind touched the apple tree, and the blossom smell drifted upon the air. Somewhere in the town, somebody was playing the piano and the music came and went, came and went, softly, drowsily. The song was Beautiful Dreamer. Somewhere else, a phonograph, scratchy and faded, was hissing out a record of Roamin’ In The Gloamin,’ sung by Harry Lapder.
The three men stood outside the ship. The port closed behind them. At every window, a face pressed, looking out. The large metal guns pointed this way and that, ready.
Now the phonograph record being played was:
–
“Oh give me a June night
The moonlight and you—”
Lustig began to tremble. Samuel Hinkston did likewise.
Hinkston’s voice was so feeble and uneven that the captain had to ask him to repeat what he had said. “I said, sir, that I think I have solved this, all of this, sir!”
“And what is the solution, Hinkston?”
The soft wind blew. The sky was serene and quiet and somewhere a stream of water ran through the cool caverns and tree-shadings of a ravine.
Somewhere a horse and wagon trotted and rolled by, bumping.
“Sir, it must be, it has to be, this is the only solution!
Rocket travel began to Mars in the years before the first’ World War, sir!” S
The captain stared at his archaeologist. “No!”
“But, yes, sir! You must admit, look at all of this! How else explain it, the houses, the lawns, the iron deer, the flowers, the pianos, the music!”
“Hinkston, Hinkston, oh,” and the captain put his hand to his face, shaking his head, his hand shaking no , his lips blue.
“Sir, listen to me.” Hinkston took his elbow persuasively and looked up into the captain’s face, pleading. “Say that there -were some people in the year 1905, perhaps, who hated wars and wanted to get away from Earth and they got together, some scientists, in secret, and built a rocket and came out here to Mars.”
“No, no, Hinkston.”
“Why not? The world was a different place in 1905, they could have kept
-it a secret much more easily.”
“But the work, Hinkston, the work of building a complex thing like a rocket, oh, no, no.” The captain looked at his shoes, looked -at his hands, looked at the houses, and then at Hinkston.
“And they caine up here, and haturally the houses they built were similar to Earth houses because they
brought the cultural -~architecture with them, and here it is!”
“And they’ve lived here all these years?” said the captain.
“In peace and quiet, sir, yes. Maybe they made a few trips, to bring enough people here for one small town, and then stopped, for fear of being discovered. That’s why the town seems so old-fashioned. I don’t see a thing,
myself, that is older than the year 1927, do you?”
“No, frankly, I don’t, Hinkston.”
“These are our people, sir. This is an American city; it’s definitely not
European!”
“That—that’s right, too, Hinkston.”
“Or maybe, just maybe, sir, rocket travel is older than we think. Perhaps it started in some part of the world hundreds of years ago, was discovered and kept secret by a small number of men, and they came to Mars, with only occasional visits to Earth over the centuries.”
“You make it sound almost reasonable.”
“it is, sir. It has to be. We have the proof here before us, all we have ‘to do now, is find some people and verify it!”
“You’re right- there, of course. We can’t just stand here and talk. Did’ you bring your gun?”
“Yes, but we won’t need it.”
“We’ll see about it. Come along, we’ll ring that doorbell and see if anyone is home.”
Their boots were deadened of all sound in the thick green grass. It smelled from a fresh mowing. In spite of himself, Captain John Black felt a great peace come over him. It had been thirty years since he had een in a small’ town, and the buzzing of spring bees on the air lulled and quieted him, and the fresh look of things was a balm to the soul.
Hollow echoes sounded from under the boards as they walked across the porch and stood before the screen door. Inside, they could see a bead curtain hung across the hall entry, and a crystal chandelier and a Maxfleld Parrish painting framed on one wall over a comfortable Morris, Chair. The house smelled old, and of the attic, and infinitely comfortable. You could hear the tinkle of ice rattling in a lemonade pitcher~ In a distant kitchen, because of the day, someone was preparing a soft, lemon drieL – –
Captain’ John Black rang the bell.
Footsteps, dainty and thin, came along the hail and a kind-faced lady of some forty years, dressed in the sort of dress you might expect in the year 1909, peered out at them.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Beg your pardon,” said Captain Black, uncertainly.
“But we’re looking for, that is, could you help us, I mean.” He stopped. She looked out at him with dark wondering eyes.
“If you’re selling something,” she said, “I’m much too busy and I haven’t time.” She turned to go.
“No, wail,” he cried bewilderingly. “What town is this?”
She looked him up and down as if he were crazy.
“What do you mean, what town is it? How could you be in a town and not know what town it was?”
The captain looked as if he wanted to go sit under a shady apple tree. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “But we’re strangers here. We’re from Earth, and we want to know how this town got here and you’ got here.”
“Are you census takers?” she asked.
“No,” be said. –
“What do you want then?” she demanded.
“Well,” said the captain.
“Well?” she asked. -‘
“How long has this town been here?” he wondered.
“It was built in 1868,” she snapped at them. “Is this a game?”
“No, not a game,” cried the captain. “Oh, God,” – be said. “Look here.
We’re from Earth”
“From where?” she said.
‘Prom Earth!” he said. –
“Where’s that?” she said.
“From Earth,” he cried. ‘ –
“Out of the ground, do you mean?”
“No, from the planet Earth!” he almost shouted.
“Here,” she insisted, “come out on the porch and I’ll show you.” , –
“No,” she said, “I won’t come out there, you are all evidently quite mad
from the sun.”
Lustig and Hinkston stood behind the captain. Hinkston now spoke up.
“Mrs.,” he said. ‘We came in a flying ship across space, among the stars. We came from the third planet from the sun, Earth, to tb-is planet, which is Mars.
Now do you understand, Mrs.?”
“Mad from the sun,” she said, taking hold of the door. “Go away now, before I call my husband who’s upstairs taking a nap, and he’ll beat you all with his fists.”
“But—” said Hinkston. “This is Mars, is it not?”
“This,” explained the woman, as if she were addressing a child, “is Green Lake, Wisconsin, on the continent of America, surrounded by the Pacific and ~Atlantic Oceans, on a place called the world, or sometimes, the Earth. Go away now. Good-bye!”
She slammed the door. –
-The three men stood before the door with their hands up in the air toward it, as if pleading with her to open it once more.
They looked at one another.
– “Let’s knock the door down,” said Lustig.
“We can’t,” sighed the captain.
“Why not?”
“She didn’t do anything bad, did she? We’re the strangers here. This is private property. Good God, Hinkstonl” He went and sat down on the porchstep.
“What, sir?”
Did it ever strike you, that maybe we got ourselves, somehow, some way, fouled up. And, by accident, came back and landed on Earth!”
“Oh, sir, oh, sir, oh oh, sir.” And Hinkston sat down numbly and thought about it.
Lustig stood up in the sunlight. “How could we have done that?”
“I don’t know, just let me think.”
}Iinkston said, “But we checked every mile of the way, and we saw Mars and our chronometers said so many miles ‘gone, and we went past the moon and out into space and here we are, on Mars. I’m sure we’re on Mars, ‘ sir.” Lustig said, “But, suppose that, by accident, in space, in time, or something, we landed on a planet in space, in another time.
Suppose this is Earth, thirty or fifty years ago? Maybe we got lost in the dimensions, do you think?”
“Oh, go away, Lustig.” -‘
“Are the men in the ship keeping an eye on us, Hink..
ston?” , –
“At their guns, sir.”
Lustig went to the door, rang the bell. When the door opened again, he asked, ‘What year is this?’ –
“1926, of, course!” cried the woman, furiously, and slammed the door again. “Did you bear that?” Lustig ran back to them, wildly, “She said 1926! We – have gone back in time. This is Earth!”
Lustig sat down and the three men let the wonder and terror of the thought afflict them. Their hands stirred fitfully on their knees. The wind blew, nodding the locks of hair on their heads.
The captain stood up, brushing off his pants. “I never thought it would be like this. It scares the hell out of me. How ‘can a thing like this happen?”
“Will anybody in the whole town believe us?” wondered Hinkston.
“Are we playing around with something dangerous? Time, I mean. Shouldn’t we just take off and go home?”
“No. We’ll try another house.”
They walked three houses down to a little white cottage under an oak tree. “I like to be as logical as I can’ get,” said the captain, He nodded at the town. “How does this sound to you, Hinkston? Suppose, as you- said originally, that rocket travel occurred years ago. And when the Earth people had lived here a number of years they began to get homesick for Earth. First a mild neurosis about it, then a full-fledged psychosis. Then, threatened insanity. What would you do, as a psychiatrist, if fated with such a problem?”
– –
Hinkston thought. “Well, I think I’d re-arrange the civilization on Mars so it resembled Earth more and more each day. If there was any way of reproducing every plant, every road and every lake, and even an ocean, I would do so. Then I would, by some vast crowd hypnosis, theoretically anyway, convince veryone in a town this size that this really was Earth, not Mars at all.”
“Good enough, Hinkston. I think we’re on the right track now. That woman in that house back there, just’ minks she’s living on Earth. It protects ‘her sanity. She and all the others in this town are the patients of the greatest experiment in migration and hypnosis you will ever lay your eyes on in your life.” –
“That’s it, sir!” cried Lustig.
“Well,” the captain sighed. “Now we’re getting some- – where. I feel better. It all sounds a bit more logical now. This talk about time and going back and forth and traveling in time turns my stomach upside
down. But, this way—”- He actually smiled for the first time in a month. “Well. It looks as if we’ll be fairly welcome here.”
“Or, will we, sir?” said Lustig. “After all, like the Pilgrims, these people came here to escape Earth. Maybe they won’t be too happy to see us, sir Maybe they’ll try to drive us ~out or kill us?”
‘We have superior weapons if that should happen. Anyway, all we can do is try. This next house now. Up we go.”
But they had hardly crossed the lawn when Lustig stopped and looked off across the town, down the quiet, dreaming afternoon street. “Sir,” he said.
“What is it, Lustig?” asked the captain.
“Oh, sir, sir, what I see, what I do see now before me, oh, oh—” said Lustig, and he began to cry. His fingers came up, twisting and trembling, and his face was all wonder and joy and incredulity. He sounded as if any moment he might go quite insane with happiness. He looked down the street and he began to run, stumbling awkwardly, falling, picking himself up, and running on. “Oh, God, God, thank you, God! Thank you!”
– “Don’t let him get away!” The captain broke into a run.
Now Lustig was running at full speed, shouting. He turned into a yard half way down the little shady side street and leaped up upon the porch of a large green house with an iron rooster on the roof
He was beating upon the door, shouting and hollering and crying when Hinkston and the captain ran up and stood in the yard, The door opened. Lustig yanked the screen wide and in a high wail of discovery and happiness, cried out, “Grandma! Grandpa!” –
Two old people stood in the doorway, their faces light. lug up.
“Albert!” Their voices piped and they rushed out to embrace and pat him on the back and move around him, “Albert, oh, Albert, it’s been so many years! How you’ve grown, boy, how big you ate, boy, oh, lbert boy, how are you!”
“Grandma, Grandpa!” sobbed Albert Lustig. “Good to see you! You look fine, fine! Oh, fine.” He held them, turned them, kissed them, hugged them, cried on them, held them out again, blinked at the little old people.- The, sun was in the sky, the wind blew, the grass was green, the screen door stood
open.
“Come in, lad, come in, there’s lemonade for you,fresh, lots of- it!”
“Grandma, Grandpa, good to see you! I’ve got- friends down here!
Here!” Lustig turned and waved wildly at the captain and Hinkston, who, all during the adventure on the porch, had stood in’ the shade of a tree, holding onto each other. “Captain, captain, come up, come up, I want you to meet my grandfolks!”
“Howdy,” said the folks. “Any- friend of Albert’s is ours, too! Don’t stand there with your mouths open Come on!”
In the living room of the old house it was cool and a grandfather clock ticked high and long and bronzed in one corner. There were soft pillows on large couches and walls filled with books and a rug cut in a thick rose pattern and antimacassars pinned to furniture, and lemonade in the hand, sweating, and cool on the thirsty tongue. “Here’s to our health.” Grandma tipped her glass to her porcelain teeth. – –
“How long you been here, Grandma?” said Lustig.
“A good many years,” she said, tartly. “Ever since we died.”
“Ever since you what?” asked Captain John Black, putting his drink down. – –
“Oh, yes,” Lustig looked at his captain. “They’ve been dead thirty years.”
“And you sit there, calmly!” cried the captain.
“Tush,” said the old woman, and winked glitteringly – at John Black. “Who are we to question what happens?
Here we are. What’s life, anyways? Who does what for why and where? All we know is here we are, alive again, and no questions -asked. A second chance.”
She toddled over and held out her -thin wrist to Captain John Black.
“Feel” He felt.~ “Solid, ain’t I?” she ask~ed. He nodded.
“You hear my voice, don’t you?” she inquired. Yes, he did. “Well, then,” she said in triumph, “why go around questioning?”
“Well,” said the captain, “it’s simply that we never thought we’d find a
thing like this on Mars.”
“And now you’ve found it. I dare say there’s lots on every planet that’ll show you God’s infinite ways.”
is this Heaven?” asked Hinkston.
“Nonsense, no. It’s a world and we get a second chance. Nobody told us why. But then nobody told us why we were on Earth, either. That other Earth, I mean. The one you came from. How do we know there wasn’t another before that one?”
“A good question,” said the captain.
The captain stood up and slapped his hand on his leg in an off-hand fashion. “We’ve got to be going. It’s been nice. Thank you for the drinks.”
He stopped. He turned and looked toward the door, startled. ‘ –
Far away, in the sunlight, there was a sound of voices, a crowd, a shouting and a great hello.
“What’s that?” asked Hinkston.
“We’ll soon find out!” And Captain John Black was out the front door abruptly, jolting across the green lawn and into the street of the Martian town.
He stood looking at the ship. The ports were open and his crew were streaming out, waving their hands. A crowd of people had gathered and in and through and among these people the members of the crew were running, talking, laughing, shaking hands. People did little dances. People swarmed. The rocket lay – empty and abandoned.
A brass band exploded in the sunlight, flinging off a gay tune from upraised tubas and trumpets. There was a bang of drums and a shrill of fifes. Little girls with golden hair jumped up and down. Little boys shouted, “Hoorayl” And fat men passed around ten-cent cigars. The mayor of the town made a speech. Then, each member of the crew with a mother on one -arm, a father or sister on the other, was spirited off down the street, into little cottages or big mansions and doors slammed shut.
The wind rose in the clear spring sky and all was silent. The brass band had banged off around a corner leaving the rocket to shine and dazzle alone in the sunlight.
“Abandoned!” cried the captain. “Abandoned the ship, they did! I’ll have their skins; by God! They had orders!”
“Sir,” said Lustig. “Don’t be too -hard on them. Those were all old relatives and friends.”
“That’s no excuse!” – –
“Think how they felt, captain, seeing familiar faces outside the ship!” –
“I would have obeyed orders! I would have~!’ The captain’s mouth
remained open.
Striding along the sidewalk – under the Martian sun, tall, smiling, eyes blue, face tan, came a young man of some twenty-six years. –
“John!” the man cried, and broke into a run.
“What?” said Captain .John Black. He swayed. –
“John, you old beggar, you!”
The man ran up and gripped his hand and slapped him
on the back. –
“It’s you,” said John Black.
“Of course, who’d you think it was!” –
“Edward!” The captain appealed now to Lustig and Hinkston, holding the stranger’s hand. “This is my brother – Edward. Ed, meet my men, Lustig, Hinkston My brother!” – – –
They tugged at each other’s hands and arms and then finally embraced.
“Ed!” “John, you old bum, you!” “You!re locking fine, Ed, but, Ed, what .is this? You haven’t ,changed over the years. You died, I remember, when you were twenty-six, and 1 was nineteen, oh God,
so many years ago, and here you are, and, Lord, what goes on, what goes on?”
Edward Black gave him a brotherly knock on the chin.
“Mom’s waiting,” he said.
“Mom?”
“And Dad, too.”
– “And Dad?” The- captain almost fell to earth as if hit upon the chest with a mighty weapon. He walked stiffly and awkwardly, out of coordination. He stuttered and whispered and talked only one or two ords at a time.
“Mom alive? Dad? Where?”
“At the old house on Oak Knoll Avenue.” –
“The old house.” The captain stared in delighted amazement. “Did you hear that, Lustig, Hinkston?”
~‘I know it’s hard for you to believe.”
“But alive. Real.”
“Don’t I feel real?” The strong arm, the firm grip, the white smile. The light, curling hair.
Hinkaton was gone. He had seen his own house down the street and was running for it. Lustig was grinning.
“Now you understand, sir, what happened to everybody on the ship. They couldn’t help themselves.”
“Yes. Yes,” said the captain, eyes shut. “Yes.” He put out his hand.
“When I open my eyes, you’ll be gone.” He opened his eyes. “You’re still here.
God, Edward, you look fine!” – – –
“Come along, lunch is waiting for you. I told Mom.” Lustig said, “Sir, Ui
be with my grandfolks if you want me.” –
“What? Oh, fine, Lustig. Later, then.”
Edward grabbed his arm and marched him. “You need support.” –
“I do. My knees, all funny. My stomach, loose. God.”
“There’s the house. Remember it?” –
“Remember it? Hell! I bet I can beat you to the front porch!” –
They ran. The wind roared over Captain John Black’s ears. The earth roared -under his feet. He saw the golden figure of Edward Black pull ahead of him in the amazing dream of reality. He saw the house rush- forward, the door open, the screen swing back. “Beat you!” cried Edward, – bounding up the steps. “I’m an old man,” panted the captain, “and you’re still young. But, then, you always beat me, I remember!”
In the doorway, Mom, pink, and plump and bright. And behind her, pepper grey, Dad, with his pipe in his hand.
“Mom, Dad!”
He ran up -the steps like a child, to meet them.
It was a fine long afternoon. They finished lunch and they sat in the living room and he told them all about his rocket and his being captain and they nodded and smiled upon him and Mother was just the same, and Dad bit the end off a cigar and lighted it in his old fashion. Mom brought in some iced tea in the middle of the afternoon. Then, there was a big turkey dinner at night and time flowing oil. When the drumsticks were sucked clean and lay brittle upon the plates, the captain leaned back in his chair and exhaled his deep contentment. Dad poured him a small glass of dry sherry. It was seven thirty in the evening. Night was in all the trees and coloring the sky, and the lamps were halos of dim light in the gentle house. From all the other houses down the streets came sounds of music; pianos playing, laughter.
Mom put a record on the victrola and she and Captain John Black bad a – dance. She was wearing the same perfume he remembered from the summer when she and Dad had been killed in the train accident. She was very real in his arms as they danced lightly to the music. –
“I’ll wake in the morning,” said the captain. “And I’ll be in my rocket in space, and this will be gone.”
“No, no, don’t think that,” she cried, softly, pleadingly~ “We’re here.
Don’t question. God is good to- us. Let’s be happy.”
The record ended with a – hissing.
“You’re tired, son,” said Dad. He waved his pipe. “You and Ed go on
upstairs. Your old bedroom is waiting for you.” . – –
“The old one?”
“The brass bed and all,” laughed Edward.
“But I should report my men in.”
“Why?” Mother was logical
“Why? Well, I don’t know. No reason, I guess. No,. none at all. What’s the difference?” He shook his head.
“I’m not being very logical these days,” –
“Good night, son.” She kissed his cheek. “‘Night, Mom.”
“Sleep tight, son.” Dad shook his hand.
“Same to you, Pop.” – “It’s good to have you home.”
“It’s good to be home.”
He left the land of cigar smoke and perfume and books and gentle light and ascended the stairs, talking, talking with Edward. Edward pushed a door open and there was the yellow brass bed and the old semaphore banners from college days and a -very musty raccoon coat which he petted with strange, muted affection. “It’s too much,” he said faintly. “Like -being in a thunder- shower without an umbrella. Fm soaked to the skin with emotion. I’m numb. I’m tired.” –
“A night’s sleep between cool clean sheets for you, my bucko.” Edward slapped wide the snowy linens and flounced the pillows. Then he put up a window and let the night blooming jasmine float in. There was moonlight and the sound of distant dancing and whispering.
“So this is Mars,” said the captain undressing.
“So this is Mars.” Edward undressed in idle, leisurely moves, drawing his shirt off over his head, revealing golden shoulders and the good muscular neck. –
– The lights were out, they were into bed, side by side, as in the days, how many decades ago? The captain lolled and was nourished by the night wind pushing the lace curtains out upon the dark room air. Among the trees, upon a lawn, someone had cranked up a portable phonograph and now it was
playing softly, “I’ll be loving you, always,- with a love that’s true, always.”
The thought of Anna came to his mind. “Is Anna here?”
His brother, lying straight out in the moonlight from the window,waited and then said, “Yes. She’s out of town. But she’ll be here in the morning.” –
The captain shut his eyes. “I want to see Anna very much?’ –
The room was square and quiet except for their breathing. “Good night, Ed.”
A pause. “Good night, John.”
He lay peacefully, letting his thoughts float. For the — first time the stress of the day was -moved aside, all of the excitement was calmed. He could think logically now. It had all been emotion. The bands playing, the sight – of familiar faces, the sick pounding of your heart. But—
now… –
How? He thought. How was all this made? And why? For what purpose?
Out of the goodness of some kind God? Was God, then, really that fine and thoughtful of his children? -How and why and what for? –
He thought of the various theories advanced in the first heat of the afternoon by Hinkston and Lustig. He let all kinds of new theories drop in lazy pebbles down through his mind, as through a dark water, now, turning, throwing out dull flashes of white light. Mars. Earth. Mom. Dad Edward. Mars. Martians.
Who had – lived here a thousand years ago on Mars? Martians? Or had this always been like this? Martians. He repeated the word quietly, inwardly. –
He laughed out loud, – almost. He had the ridiculous theory, all of a sudden. It gave him a kind of chilled feeling. It was really nothing to think of, of course. Highly. improbable. Silly. Forget it. Ridiculous.
But, he thought, Just suppose. Just suppose now, that there were Martians living on Mars and they saw our ship coming and -saw us inside our ship and hated – us. Suppose, now, just for the hell of it, that they wanted to destroy us, as invaders, as unwanted ones, and – they wanted to do it in a very clever way, so that we would be taken- off guard. Well, what would the best weapon be that a Martian could use against Earthmen with atom weapons? –
The answer was interesting. Telepathy, hypnosis, memory and imagination. –
Suppose all these houses weren’t real at all, – this bed not real, but only figments of my own imagination, given substance by telepathy and hypnosis by the Martians.
Suppose these houses are really some other shape, a Martian shape, but, -by playing on my desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my old home town, my old house, to lull me out of my suspicions?
What better way to fool a man, by his own emotions.
And suppose those two people in the next room, asleep, are not my mother and- father at all. But two Martians, incredibly brilliant, with –the ability to keep me under this dreaming hypnosis all of the time?
And that brass band, today? What a clever plan it would be. First, fool Lustig, then fool Hinkston, then gather a crowd around -the rocket ship and wave. And- all the men in the ship, seeing mothers, aunts, uncles, sweethearts dead ten, twenty years ago, naturally, disregarding orders, would rush- out and abandon the ship. What more natural?- What more unsuspecting? What more simple? A man doesn’t ask too many questions when his mother is suddenly brought back to life; he’s much too happy. And – the brass band played and everybody was taken off to private homes. And here we all are, tonight, in various houses, in various beds, with no weapons to protect us, and the rocket lies in the moonlight, empty. And wouldn’t it be horrible and terrifying to discover that all of this was part of some -great clever plan by the Martians to divide and conquer us, and kill us. Some time during the night, perhaps, my brother here on this bed, wifi change form, melt, shift, and become a one eyed, green and yellow-toothed Martian. It would be very simple for him just – to -turn over in bed and put a- knife into my heart. And in all those other houses down the street a dozen other brothers or fathers suddenly melting away and taking out knives and doing things to the unsuspecting, sleeping men of Earth. –
His hands were shaking under the covers. His body was cold, -Suddenly it was not a theory. Suddenly he was very afraid. He lifted- himself in bed and listened. The night was very quiet. The music had stopped. The wind had died.
His brother (?) lay sleeping beside him.
Very carefully he lifted the sheets, rolled them back. He slipped from bed and was walking softly across the room when his brother’s voice said, “Where are you going?”
“What?” –
His brother’s voice was quite cold. “I said, where do you think you’re going?”
“For a drink of water.”
“But you’re not thirsty.”
“Yes, yes, I am.” –
“No, you’re not.” –
Captain John Black broke and ran across the room.
He screamed. He screamed twice. – He never reached- the door.
…
In the morning, the brass band played a mournful dirge. From every house in the street came little solemn processions bearing long boxes and along the sun-filled street, weeping and changing, came the grandmas and grandfathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, walking -to the churchyard, where there were open holes – dug freshly and new- tombstones installed. Seventeen – holes in all, and seventeen tombstones. Three of the tombstones said, CAPTAIN JOHN BLACK, ALBERT LUSTIG, and SAMUEL HINKSTON. – – –
The mayor made a little sad speech, his face sometimes looking like the
mayor, sometimes looking like something else. — – – –
Mother and Father Black were there, with Brother Edward, and they ‘cried, their faces melting now – from a familiar face into something else. – –
Grandpa and Grandma Lustig were there, weeping~ their faces. Also shifting- like wax, – shivering as a- thing does in waves of heat on a summer day. – –
The coffins were lowered. Somebody murmured –about “the unexpected and sudden deaths of seventeen fine men during the night—”. – – – –
Earth was shoveled in on the coffin tops. –
After the funeral the brass band slammed and banged into town and the crowd stood around and waved and shouted as the rocket was torn to pieces and strewn about and blown up. – –
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Here’s a nice charming story. I guess it is a bit dated, but the hopefulness of the 1960’s shines through. Lovely.
THE END OF THE BEGINNING
Ray Bradbury
He stopped the lawn mower in the middie of the yard, because he felt that the
sun at just that moment had gone down and the stars come out. The fresh-cut
grass that had showered his face and body died soft!y away. Yes, the stars were
there, faint at first, but brightening in the clear desert sky. He heard the
porch screen door tap shut and felt his wife watching him as he watched the
night.
“Almost time,” she said.
He nodded; he did not have to check his watch. In the passing moments he felt
very old, then very young, very cold, then very warm, now this, now that.
Suddenly he was miles away. He was his own son talking steadily, moving briskly
to cover his pounding heart and the resurgent panics as he felt himself slip
into fresh uniform, check food supplies, oxygen flasks, pressure helmet,
space-suiting, and turn as every man on earth tonight turned, to gaze at the
swiftly filling sky.
Then, quickly, he was back, once more the father of the son, hands gripped to
the lawn-mower handle. His wife called, “Come sit on the porch.”
“I’ve got to keep busy!”
She came down the steps and across the lawn. “Don’t worry about Robert; he’ll be
all right.”
“But it’s all so new,” he heard himself say. “It’s never been done before. Think
of it – a manned rocket going up tonight to build the first space station. Good
lord, it can’t be done, it doesn’t exist, there’s no rocket, no proving ground,
no take-off time, no technicians. For that matter, I don’t even have a son named
Bob. The whole thing’s too much for me!”
“Then what are you doing out here, staring?”
He shook his head. “Well, late this morning, walking to the office, I heard
someone laugh out loud. It shocked me, so I froze in the middle of the street.
It was me, laughing! Why? Because finally I really knew what Bob was going to do tonight; at last I believed it. Holy is a word I never use, but that’s how I
felt stranded in all that traffic. Then, middle of the afternoon I caught myself
humming. You know the song. ‘A wheel in a wheel. Way in the middle of the air.’
I laughed again. The space station, of course, I thought. The big wheel with
hollow spokes where Bob’ll live six or eight months, then get along to the moon.
Walking home, I remembered more of the song. ‘Little wheel run by faith, Big
wheel run by the grace of God.’ I wanted to jump, yell, and flame-out myself!”
His wife touched his arm. “If we stay out here, let’s at least be comfortable.”
They placed two wicker rockers in the center of the lawn and sat quietly as the
stars dissolved out of darkness in pale crushings of rock salt strewn from
horizon to horizon.
“Why,” said his wife, at last, “it’s like waiting for the fireworks at Sisley
Field every year.”
“Bigger crowd tonight . . .”
“I keep thinking – a billion people watching the sky right now, their mouths all
open at the same time.”
They waited, feeling the earth move under their chairs.
“What time is it now?”
“Eleven minutes to eight.”
“You’re always right; there must be a clock in your head.”
“I can’t be wrong tonight. I’ll be able to tell you one second before they blast
off. Look! The ten-minute warning!”
On the western sky they saw four crimson flares open out, float shimmering down the wind above the desert, then sink silently to the extinguishing earth.
In the new darkness the husband and wife did not rock in their chairs.
After a while he said, “Eight minutes.” A pause. “Seven minutes.” What seemed a
much longer pause. “Six . . .”
His wife, her head back, studied the stars immediately above her and murmured,
“Why?” She closed her eyes. “Why the rockets, why tonight? Why all this? I’d
like to know.”
He examined her face, pale in the vast powdering light of the Milky Way. He felt
the stirring of an answer, but let his wife continue.
“I mean it’s not that old thing again, is it, when people asked why men climbed
Mt. Everest and they said, ‘Because it’s there’? I never understood. That was no
answer to me.”
Five minutes, he thought. Time ticking . . . his wrist watch . . . a wheel in a
wheel . . . little wheel run by . . . big wheel run by . . . way in the middle
of . . . four minutes! . . . The men snug in the rocket by now, the hive, the
control board flickering with light.
His lips moved.
“All I know is it’s really the end of the beginning. The Stone Age, Bronze Age,
Iron Age; from now on we’ll lump all those together under one big name for when we walked on Earth and heard the birds at morning and cried with envy. Maybe we’ll call it the Earth Age, or maybe the Age of Gravity. Millions of years we fought gravity. When we were amoebas and fish we struggled to get out of the sea without gravity crushing us. Once safe on the shore we fought to stand upright without gravity breaking our new invention, the spine, tried to walk without stumbling, run without falling. A billion years Gravity kept us home, mocked us with wind and clouds, cabbage moths and locusts. That’s what’s so god-awful big about tonight . . . it’s the end of old man Gravity and the age we’ll remember him by, for once and all. I don’t know where they’ll divide the ages, at the Persians, who dreamt of flying carpets, or the Chinese, who all unknowing
celebrated birthdays and New Years with strung ladyfingers and high skyrockets,
or some minute, some incredible second the next hour. But we’re in at the end of
a billion years trying, the end of something long and to us humans, anyway,
honorable.”
Three minutes . . . two minutes fifty-nine seconds . . . two minutes fifty-eight
seconds . . .
“But,” said his wife, “I still don’t know why.”
Two minutes, he thought. Ready? Ready? Ready? The far radio voice calling.
Ready! Ready! Ready! The quick, faint replies from the humming rocket. Check!
Check! Check!
Tonight, he thought, even if we fail with this first, we’ll send a second and a
third ship and move on out to all the planets and later, all the stars. We’ll
just keep going until the big words like immortal and forever take on meaning.
Big words, yes, that’s what we want. Continuity. Since our tongues first moved
in our mouths we’ve asked, What does it all mean? No other question made sense, with death breathing down our necks. But just let us settle in on ten thousand worlds spinning around ten thousand alien suns and the question will fade away. Man will be endless and infinite, even as space is endless and infinite. Man will go on, as space goes on, forever. Individuals will die as always, but our
history will reach as far as we’ll ever need to see into the future, and with
the knowledge of our survival for all time to come, we’ll know security and thus
the answer we’ve always searched for. Gifted with life, the least we can do is
preserve and pass on the gift to infinity. That’s a goal worth shooting for.
The wicker chairs whispered ever so softly on the grass.
One minute.
“One minute,” he said aloud.
“Oh!” His wife moved suddenly to seize his hands. “I hope that Bob . . .”
“He’ll be all right!”
“Oh, God, take care . . .”
Thirty seconds.
“Watch now.”
Fifteen, ten, five . . .
“Watch!”
Four, three, two, one.
“There! There! Oh, there, there!”
They both cried out. They both stood. The chairs toppled back, fell flat on the
lawn. The man and his wife swayed, their hands struggled to find each other,
grip, hold. They saw the brightening color in the sky and, ten seconds later,
the great uprising comet burn the air, put out the stars, and rush away in fire
flight to become another star in the returning profusion of the Milky Way. The
man and wife held each other as if they had stumbled on the rim of an incredible
cliff that faced an abyss so deep and dark there seemed no end to it. Staring
up, they heard themselves sobbing and crying. Only after a long time were they
able to speak.
“It got away, it did, didn’t it?”
“Yes . . .”
“It’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Yes . . . yes . . .”
“It didn’t fall back . . .?”
“No, no, it’s all right, Bob’s all right, it’s all right.”
They stood away from each other at last.
He touched his face with his hand and looked at his wet fingers. “I’ll be
damned,” he said, “I’ll be damned.”
They waited another five and then ten minutes until the darkness in their heads,
the retina, ached with a million specks of fiery salt. Then they had to close
their eyes.
“Well,” she said, “now let’s go in.”
He could not move. Only his hand reached a long way out by itself to find the
lawn-mower handle. He saw what his hand had done and said, “There’s just a
little more to do . . .”
“But you can’t see.”
“Well enough,” he said. “I must finish this. Then we’ll sit on the porch awhile
before we turn in.”
He helped her put the chairs on the porch and sat her down and then walked back out to put his hands on the guide bar of the lawn mower. The lawn mower. A wheel in a wheel. A simple machine which you held in your bands, which you sent on ahead with a rush and a clatter while you walked behind with your quiet
philosophy. Racket, followed by warm silence. Whirling wheel, then soft footfall
of thought.
I’m a billion years old, he told himself; I’m one minute old. I’m one inch, no,
ten thousand miles, tall. I look down and can’t see my feet they’re so far off
and gone away below.
He moved the lawn mower. The grass showering up fell softly around him; he
relished and savored it and felt that he was all mankind bathing at last in the
fresh waters of the fountain of youth.
Thus bathed, he remembered the song again about the wheels and the faith and the grace of God being way up there in the middle of the sky where that single star, among a million motionless stars, dared to move and keep on moving.
Then he finished cutting the grass.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Yeah. So today I went and got myself a nice beer, as is my custom on my way to the house for lunch. It’s a nice day. The weather is warming up. Getting a little glare from the clouds and the “feeling” in the air is one of calmness. There was a gaggle of young girls near the elevator. All in their lower to mid 20’s. Nice. Cute. Entry-level office workers.
Came home, and my damn dog decides to break the afternoon stillness by barking like a mad-dog.
He’s getting old and doggie dementia is kicking in. I had to go up to him let him smell my hand before I could calm him down. Ah. That’s life, you know. There’s always different folk on different wavelengths creating the canopy of life that we know and love.
The wife made me a Cobb Salad to have with my beer. It’s good stuff, I’ll tell you what.
Cobb salad.
Lately I have been a-wondering about what is “next”. You know, World War III, a new beginning, or something else. I have come to the conclusion that we have reached the point that I like to refer to as “The end of the beginning“.
Ah. Isn’t that the case.
It’s like this video (below).
As always, please click on the picture to have the video load and open up in a new window.
It’s not a dreary thing.
It’s a realization that things are changing, and yet the changes will continue.
My top running posts, by far, are my writings on SHTF. As has been the case for the last three months or so. People from all over the internet have been visiting my writings on these matters. They don’t post comments, but they read, stick around and then disappear. Like ghosts in the night. I don’t know who they are, or why they are reading about how to prepare for turmoil inside of America. But they do.
People are scared.
As uncomfortable as things are, they are not yet dire. There is this feeling like an axe is going to fall any day now, and it’s at all levels. It’s like the cats and dogs barking before an earthquake, or that bird migrate South before a disaster. Something is up, but no one can put their finger on it.
The “news” is following the direction that must have been set in place years earlier. It does not reflect this feeling; this situation, or this condition. Instead its the same old bullshit.
The same bullshit.
Accuse China of XXXX, and YYYY.
Don’t report on radical Marxist legislation or progressive issues, but they continue apace.
Harp on the Coronavirus.
Promote the super wealthy as if the debt-serfs give a fuck anymore.
New taxes on the horizon!
But NASA is developing new things!
Yeah. Different subjects, but the same tired old formula.
It’s the end of the beginning.
People know. They KNOW.
The world that we all used to live in, and the ideas and the beliefs that we all used to have are long gone. They are dead. Dead as in two day old fish dead. Dead like Fat Fredy’s Cat sniffing a dead fish dead.
Fat Fredy’s cat
.
But why?
Why is the human species out in the West (not in China, nor Russia, nor Africa) feel this way?
Why?
Certainly there’s a lot of “chatter” on the social media. Today “Moon Over Alabama” and all sort of “armchair experts” talking and discussing the Tao inside of China and how that defines what China is today. LOL!
Fact of the matter.
Inside of China… no one talks about the Tao.
I do mean NO ONE.
Although Taoism is China's only indigenous religion, its sway now pales compared with its previous status.
- Corespirit
That’s like assuming all Americans have daily discussions about the influences of President Taft on contemporaneous social media platforms. Especially what President Traft would have to say in regards to selfies on Tiktok, and shadow-blocking trolls.
So silly.
Seriously.
I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
Perhaps it has something to do with how the West; the American run Western societies have evolved. And to which degree they sit as the world around them evolves in a different direction. Perhaps it is something much more fundamental to this degree…
The End of the Beginning
I believe that the big changes that all of us are due to experience have already been set in motion. And with this understanding comes the realization that “the stage is set”.
What is next…
Well it is the Start of the changes.
All that we have experienced so far is just the prep-work. And it’s all in place. Every single thing is where it needs to be for the big changes to take place.
What am I talking about?
I am talking about this….
This is a most excellent interview from the Greanville post. All credit to the authors. It was edited to fit this venue, but aside from that it is as intact as possible.
It deals with economics and finance and government systems. All stuff that I find boring. But this point of view is refreshing as it looks at what is going on and how the banking class is looking at profiting from the collapse. Yikes! What a great read!
Pepe: So, what’s going to happen in the, let’s say, short to mid-term in the U.S.?
Michael, we are seeing the corrosion of the whole system, not only externally in terms of foreign policy and the end of the free lunch, but internally with those 70-million-plus “deplorables” being literally canceled from public debate, the impoverishment of the middle classes, with over 50 million people in America who are practically becoming literally poor.
And obviously the American dream ended a few decades ago, maybe, but now there’s not even a glimpse of it, that there could be a renewal of the American dream.
So we have a larval civil war situation, degrading on a daily basis.
What’s the end game in fact? And what exactly does Wall Street, the American ruling class —the guys who have those lunches at the Harvard club — what do they ultimately want?
Michael: Well, what you call a disaster for the economy, isn’t it a bonanza for the 1 percent?
This is a victory of finance.
You look at it as a collapse of industrial capitalism. I look at it as the victory of rentier finance capitalism.
You’re having probably 10 million Americans that are going to be thrown out of their apartments and their homes in June when the moratorium on rents and mortgages ends.
You’re going to have a vast increase in the homeless population.
That will probably represent an increase in people who use the subways. Where else are they going to live?
And all of this, there’s an immense amount of private capital firms that have all been created in the last year of just wealth accumulations and they’re saying there are going to be such great opportunities to pick up real estate at bargain prices, all of this for the commercial real estate, that’s broken, all the buildings and the restaurants that have to be sold because they can’t meet their mortgage payments and their rents, all the houses that are going to be under, private capital can come in and do what was done after the Obama evictions.
We can do what Blackstone did. We can buy them all out for pennies on the dollar. So, for them, they’re looking at their own 20-year plan. And their 20-year plan is to grab everything!
The United States is an object lesson for China on what to avoid, not only in industrializing the economy, but in creating a picture of the economy as if everybody earns everything and there’s no exploitation, no unearned income, nobody makes money in their sleep and there’s no 1 percent..."
Michael Hudson: Well, I’m honored to be here on the same show with Pepe and discuss our mutual concern. And I think you have to frame the whole issue that China is thriving, and the West has reached the end of the whole 75-year expansion it had since 1945.
So, there was an illusion that America is de-industrializing because of competition from China. And the reality is there is no way that America can re-industrialize and regain its export markets with the way that it’s organized today, financialized and privatized and if China didn’t exist. You’d still have the Rust Belt rusting out. You’d still have American industry not being able to compete abroad simply because the cost structure is so high in the United States.
The wealth is no longer made here by industrializing. It’s made financially, mainly by making capital gains. Rising prices for real estate or for stocks and for bonds. In the last nine months, since the coronavirus came here, the top 1 percent of the U.S. economy grew by $1 trillion. It’s been a windfall for the 1 percent. The stock market is way up, the bond market is up, the real estate market is up while the rest of the economy is going down. Despite the tariffs that Trump put on, Chinese imports, trade with China is going up because we’re just not producing materials.
America doesn’t make its own shoes. It doesn’t make some nuts and bolts or fasteners, it doesn’t make industrial things anymore because if money is to be made off an industrial company it’s to buy and sell the company, not to make loans to increase the company’s production. New York City, where I live, used to be an industrial city and, the industrial buildings, the mercantile buildings have all been gentrified into high-priced real estate and the result is that Americans have to pay so much money on education, rent, medical care that if they got all of their physical needs, their food, their clothing, all the goods and services for nothing, they still couldn’t compete with foreign labor because of all of the costs that they have to pay that are essentially called rent-seeking.
Housing in the United States now absorbs about 40 percent of the average worker’s paycheck. There’s 15 percent taken off the top of paychecks for pensions, Social Security and for Medicare. Further medical insurance adds more to the paycheck, income taxes and sales taxes add about another 10 percent. Then you have student loans and bank debt. So basically, the American worker can only spend about one third of his or her income on buying the goods and services they produce. All the rest goes into the FIRE sector — the finance, insurance and real estate sector — and other monopolies.
And essentially, we became what’s called a rent-seeking economy, not a productive economy. So, when people in Washington talk about American capitalism versus Chinese socialism this is confusing the issue. What kind of capitalism are we talking about?
America used to have industrial capitalism in the 19th century. That’s how it got richer originally but now it’s moved away from industrial capitalism towards finance capitalism. And what that means is that essentially the mixed economy that made America rich — where the government would invest in education and infrastructure and transportation and provide these at low costs so that the employers didn’t have to pay labor to afford high costs — all of this has been transformed over the last hundred years.
And we’ve moved away from the whole ethic of what was industrial capitalism. Before, the idea of capitalism in the 19th century from Adam Smith to Ricardo, to John Stuart Mill to Marx was very clear and Marx stated it quite clearly; capitalism was revolutionary. It was to get rid of the landlord class. It was to get rid of the rentier class. It was to get rid of the banking class essentially, and just bear all the costs that were unnecessary for production, because how did England and America and Germany gain their markets?
“We’ve moved away from the whole ethic of what was industrial capitalism.”
They gained their markets basically by the government picking up a lot of the costs of the economy. The government in America provided low-cost education, not student debt. It provided transportation at subsidized prices. It provided basic infrastructure at low cost. And so, government infrastructure was considered a fourth factor of production.
And if you read what the business schools in the late 19th century taught like Simon Patten at the Wharton School, it’s very much like socialism. In fact, it’s very much like what China is doing. And in fact, China is following in the last 30 or 40 years pretty much the same way of getting rich that America followed.
It had its government fund basic infrastructure. It provides low-cost education. It invests in high-speed railroads and airports, in the building of cities. So, the government bears most of the costs and, that means that employers don’t have to pay workers enough to pay a student loan debt. They don’t have to pay workers enough to pay enormous rent such as you have in the United States. They don’t have to pay workers to save for a pension fund, to pay the pension later on. And most of all the Chinese economy doesn’t really have to pay a banking class because banking is the most important public utility of all. Banking is what China has kept in the hands of government and Chinese banks don’t lend for the same reasons that American banks lend.
(When I said that China can pay lower wages than the U.S., what I meant was that China provides as public services many things that American workers have to pay out of their own pockets – such as health care, free education, subsidized education, and above all, much lower debt service.
When workers have to go into debt in order to live, they need much higher wages to keep solvent. When they have to pay for their own health insurance, they have to earn more. The same is true of education and student debt. So much of what Americans seem to be earning — more than workers in other countries — goes right through their hands to the FIRE sector. So, what seems to be “low wages” in China go a lot further than higher wages in the United States.)
Eighty percent of American bank loans are mortgage loans to real estate and the effect of loosening loan standards and increasing the market for real estate is to push up the cost of living, push up the cost of housing. So, Americans have to pay more and more money for their housing whether they’re renters or they’re buyers, in which case the rent is for paying mortgage interest.
So, all of this cost structure has been built into the economy. China’s been able pretty much, to avoid all of this, because its objective in banking is not to make a profit and interest, not to make capital gains and speculation. It creates money to fund actual means of production to build factories, to build research and development, to build transportation facilities, to build infrastructure. Banks in America don’t lend for that kind of thing.
“So, you have a diametric opposite philosophy of how to develop between the United States and China.”
They only lend against collateral that’s already in place because they won’t make a loan if it’s not backed by collateral. Well, China creates money through its public banks to create capital, to create the means of production. So, you have a diametric opposite philosophy of how to develop between the United States and China.
The United States has decided not to gain wealth by actually investing in means of production and producing goods and services, but in financial ways. China is gaining wealth the old-fashioned way, by producing it. And whether you call this, industrial capitalism or a state capitalism or a state socialism or Marxism, it basically follows the same logic of real economics, the real economy, not the financial overhead. So, you have China operating as a real economy, increasing its production, becoming the workshop of the world as England used to be called and America trying to draw in foreign resources, live off of foreign resources, live by trying to make money by investing in the Chinese stock market or now, moving investment banks into China and making loans to China not actual industrial capitalism ways.
“China is gaining wealth the old-fashioned way, by producing it.”
So, you could say that America has gone beyond industrial capitalism, and they call it the post-industrial society, but you could call it the neo-feudal society. You could call it the neo-rentier society, or you could call it debt peonage but it’s not industrial capitalism.
And in that sense, there’s no rivalry between China and America. These are different systems going their own way and I better let Pepe pick it up from there.
Pepe Escobar: Okay. Thank you, Michael, this is brilliant. And you did it in less than 15 minutes. You told the whole story in 15 minutes. Well, my journalistic instinct is immediately to start questions to Michael. So, this is exactly what I’m gonna do now. I think it is much better to basically illustrate some points of what Michael just said, comparing the American system, which is finance capitalism essentially, with industrial capitalism that is in effect in China. Let me try to start with a very concrete and straight to the point question, Michael.
Okay. let’s says that more or less, if we want to summarize it, basically they try to tax the nonproductive rentier class. So, this would be the Chinese way to distribute wealth, right? Sifting through the Chinese economic literature, there is a very interesting concept, which is relatively new (correct me if I am wrong, Michael) in China, which they call stable investment. So stable investment, according to the Chinese would be to issue special bonds as extra capital in fact, to be invested in infrastructure building all across China, and they choose these projects in what they call weak areas and weak links. So probably in some of the inner provinces, or probably in some parts of Tibet or Xinjiang for instance. So, this is a way to invest in the real economy and in real government investment projects.
Right? So, my question in fact, is does this system create extra local debt, coming directly from this financing from Beijing? Is this a good recipe for sustainable development, the Chinese way and the recipe that they could expand to other parts of the Global South?
Michael: Well, this is a big problem that they’re discussing right now. The localities, especially rural China, (and China is still largely rural) only cover about half of their working budget from taxation. So, they have a problem. How are they going to get the balance of the money? Well, there is no official revenue sharing between the federal government and its state banks and the localities.
So, the localities can’t simply go to central government and say, give us more money. The government lets the localities be very independent. And it is sort of the “let a hundred flowers bloom” concept. And so, they’ve let each locality just go the long way, but the localities have run a big deficit.
What do they do? Well in the United States they would issue bonds on which New York is about to default. But in China, the easiest way for the localities to make money, is unfortunately they will do something like Chicago did. They will sell their tax rights for the next 75 years for current money now.
So, a real estate developer will come in and say; look we will give you the next 75 years of tax on this land, because we want to build projects on this (a set of buildings). So, what this means is that now the cities have given away all their source of rent.
Let me show you the problem by what Indiana and Chicago did. Chicago also was very much like China’s countryside cities. So, it sold parking meters and its sidewalks to a whole series of Wall Street investors, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Fund for seventy-five years. And that meant that for 75 years, this Wall Street consortium got to control the parking meters.
So, they put up the parking meters all over Chicago, raised the price of parking, raised the cost of driving to Chicago. And if Chicago would have a parade and interrupt parking, then Chicago has to pay the Abu Dhabi fund and Wall Street company what it would have made anyway. And this became such an awful disaster that finally Wall Street had to reverse the deal and undo it because it was giving privatization a bad name here. The same thing happened in Indiana.
Indiana was running a deficit and it decided to sell its roads to a Wall Street investment firm to make a toll road. The toll on the Indiana turnpike was so high that drivers began to take over the side roads. That’s the problem if you sell future tax revenues in advance.
Now what China and the localities there are discussing is that we’ve already given the real estate tax at very low estimates to the commercial developers, so what do we do? Well, I’ve given them my advice. I’m a professor of economics at the Peking University, School of Marxist studies and I’ve had discussions with the Central Committee. I also have an official position at Wuhan University. There, we’re discussing how China can put an added tax for all of the valuable land, that’s gone up. How can it be done to let the cities collect this tax? Our claim is that the cities, in selling these tax rights for 75 years, have sold what in Britain would be called ground rent (i.e. what’s paid to the landed aristocracy).
Over and above that there’s the market rent. So, China should pass a market-rent tax over and above the ground rent tax to reflect the current value. And there they’re thinking of, well, do we say that this is a capital gain on the land? Well, it’s not really a capital gain until you sell the land, but it’s value. It’s the valuation of the capital. And they’re looking at whether they should just say this is the market rent tax over and above the flat tax that has been paid in advance, or it’s a land tax on the capital gain for land.
Now, all of this requires that there be a land map of the whole country. And they are just beginning to create such a land map as a basis for how you calculate how much the rent there is.
What I found in China is something very strange. A few years ago, in Beijing, they had the first, International Marxist conference where I was the main speaker and I was talking about Marx’s discussion of the history of rent theory in Volume II and Volume III of Capital where Marx discusses all of the classical economics that led up to his view; Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and Marx’s theory of surplus value was really the first history of economic thought that was written, although it wasn’t published until after he died. Well, you could see that there was a little bit of discomfort with some of the Marxists at the conference. And so, they invited for the next time my colleague David Harvey to come and talk about Marxism in the West.
Well, David gave both the leading and the closing speech of the conference and said, you’ve got to go beyond volume I of Capital. Volume I was what Marx wrote as his addition to classical economics, saying that there was exploitation in industrial employment of labor as well as rent seeking and then he said, now that I’ve done my introduction here, let me talk about how capitalism works in Volumes II and III. Volumes II and III are all about rent and finance and David Harvey has published a book on Volume III of Capital and his message to Peking University and the second Marxist conference was – you’ve got to read Volume II, and III.
Well, you can see that, there’s a discussion now over what is Marxism and a friend and colleague at PKU said Marxism is a Chinese word; It’s the Chinese word for politics. That made everything clear to me. Now I get it! I’ve been asked by the Academy of Social Sciences in China to create a syllabus of the history of rent theory and value theory. And essentially in order to have an idea of how you calculate rent, how do you make a national income analysis where you show rent, you have to have a theory of value and price and rent is the excess of price over the actual cost value. Well, for that you need a concept of cost of production and that’s what classical economics is all about. Post-classical economics denied all of this. The whole idea of classical economics is that not all income is earned.
Landlords don’t earn their income for making rent in their sleep as John Stuart Mill said. Banks don’t earn their income by just sitting there and letting debts accrue and interest compounding and doubling. The classical economists separated actual unearned income from the production and consumption economy.
Well, around the late 19th century in America, you had economists fighting against not only Marx, but also even against Henry George, who at that time, was urging a land tax in New York. And so, at Columbia University, John Bates Clark developed a whole theory that everybody earns whatever they can get. That there was no such thing as unearned income and that has become the basis for American national income statistics and thought ever since. So, if you look at today’s GDP figures for the United States, they have a figure for 8 percent of the GDP for the homeowners’ rent. But homeowners wouldn’t pay themselves if they had to rent the apartment to themselves, then you’ll have interest at about 12 percent of GDP.
And I thought, well how can interest be so steady? What happens to all of the late fees; that 29 percent that credit card companies charge? I called up the national income people in Washington, when I was there. And they said well, late fees and penalties are considered financial services.
And so, this is what you call a service economy. Well, there’s no service in charging a late fee, but they add all of the late fees. When people can’t pay their debts and they owe more and more, all of that is considered an addition to GDP. When housing becomes more expensive and prices American labor out of the market, that’s called an increase in GDP.
This is not how a country that wants to develop is going to create a national income account. So, there’s a long discussion in China about, just to answer your question, how do you create an account to distinguish between what’s the necessary cost to production and what’s an unnecessary production cost and how do we avoid doing what the United States did. So again, no rivalry. The United States is an object lesson for China on what to avoid, not only in industrializing the economy, but in creating a picture of the economy as if everybody earns everything and there’s no exploitation, no unearned income, nobody makes money in their sleep and there’s no 1 percent. Well, that’s what’s really at issue and why the whole world is splitting apart as you and I are discussing in what we’re writing.
“When people can’t pay their debts and they owe more and more, all of that is considered an addition to GDP.”
Pepe: Thank you, Michael. Thank you very much. So just to sum it all up, can we say that Beijing’s strategy is to save especially provincial areas from leasing their land, their infrastructure for 60 years or 75 years? As you just mentioned, can we say that the fulcrum of their national strategy is what you define as the market rent tax? Is this the No. 1 mechanism that they are developing?
Michael: Ideally, they want to keep rents as low as possible because rent is a cost of living and a cost of doing business. They don’t have banks that are lending to inflate the real estate market.
However, in almost every Western country — the U.S., Germany England — the value of stocks and bonds and the value of real estate is just about exactly the same. But for China, the value of real estate is way, way larger than the value of stocks.
And the reason is not because the Chinese Central bank, the Bank of China lends for real estate; it’s because they lend to intermediaries and the intermediaries have financed a lot of housing purchases in China. And, this is really the problem for if they levy a land tax, then you’re going to make a lot of these financial intermediaries go bust.
That’s what I’m advocating, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. These financial intermediaries shouldn’t exist, and this same issue came up in 2009 in the United States. You had the leading American bank being the most crooked and internally corrupt bank in the country, Citibank making junk mortgage, and it was broke.
Its entire net worth was wiped out as a result of its fraudulent junk mortgages. Well, Sheila Bair, the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) wanted to close it down and take it over. Essentially that would have made it into a public bank and that would be a wonderful thing. She said, look Citibank shouldn’t be doing what it’s doing. And she wrote all this up in an autobiography. And, she was overruled by President Obama and Tim Geithner saying, but wait a minute, those are our campaign contributors. So, they were loyal to the campaign contributors, but not the voters; and they didn’t close Citibank down.
And the result is that the Federal Reserve ended up creating about $7 trillion of quantitative easing to bail out the banks. The homeowners weren’t bailed out. Ten million American families lost their homes as a result of junk mortgages in excess of what the property was actually worth.
All of this was left on the books, foreclosed and sold to private capital companies like Blackstone. And the result is that home ownership in America declined from 68 percent of the population down to about 61 percent. Well, right where the Obama administration left off, you’re about to have the Biden administration begin in January with an estimated 5 million Americans losing their homes. They’re going to be evicted because they’ve been unemployed during the pandemic. They’ve been working in restaurants or gyms or other industries that have been shut down because of the pandemic. They’re going to be evicted and many homeowners, low-income homeowners have been unable to pay their mortgages.
There’s going to be a wave of foreclosures. The question is, who’s going to bear the cost? Should it be 15 million American families who lose their homes just so the banks won’t lose money? Or should we let the banks that have made all of the growth since 2008? Ninety five percent of American GDP of the population has seen its wealth go down. All the wealth has been accumulating for the 5 percent in statistics. Now the question is should this 5 percent that’s got all the wealth lose or should the 95 percent lose?
The Biden administration says the 95 percent should lose basically. And you’re going to see a wave of closures so that the question in China should be that, these intermediate banks (they’re not really banks they are sort of like payday loan lenders), should they come in and, bear the loss or should Chinese localities and the people bear the loss? Somebody has to lose when you’re charging, you’re collecting the land’s rent that was paid to the creditors, and either the creditors have to lose or, the tax collector loses and that’s the conflict that exists in every society of the world today. And, in the West, the idea is the tax collectors should lose and whatever the tax collector relinquishes should be free for the banks to collect. In China obviously, they don’t want that to happen and they don’t want to see a financial class developing along US lines.
Pepe: Michael, there’s a quick question in all this, which is the official position by Beijing in terms of helping the localities. Their official position is that there won’t be any bailouts of local debt. How do they plan to do that?
Michael: What they’re discussing, how are you not going to do it? They think they sort of let localities go their own way. And they think, well you know which ones are going to succeed, and which ones aren’t, they didn’t want to have a one-size-fits all central planning. They wanted to have flexibility. Well, now they have flexibility. And when you have many different “let a hundred flowers bloom,” not all the flowers are going to bloom at the same rate.
And the question is, if they don’t bail out the cities, how are the cities going to operate? Certainly, China has never let markets steer the economy, the government steers the markets. That’s what socialism is as opposed to finance capitalism. So, the question is, you can let localities go broke and yet you’re not going to destroy any of the physical assets of the localities, and all of this is going to be in place. The question is how are you going to arrange the flow of income to all of these roads and buildings and land that’s in place? How do you create a system? Essentially, they’re saying well, if we’re industrial engineers, how do we just plan things? Forget credit, forget property claims, forget the rentier claims. How are we just going to design an economy that operates most efficiently? And that’s what they’re working on now to resolve this situation because it’s gotten fairly critical.
Pepe: Yes, especially in the countryside. Well, I think, a very good metaphor in terms of comparing both systems are investment in infrastructure. You travel to China a lot so, you’ve seen. You’ll travel through high-speed rail. You’ll see those fantastic airports, in Pudong or the new airport in Beijing. And then you’ll take the Acela to go from Washington to New York City, which is something that I used to do years ago. And the comparison is striking. Isn’t it?
Or if you go to France, for instance, when France started development of the TGV, which in terms of a national infrastructure network, is one of the best networks on the planet. And the French started doing this 30 years ago, even more. Is there…it’s not in terms of way out, but if we analyze the minutia, it’s obvious that following the American finance utilization system, we could never have something remotely similar happening in United States in terms of building infrastructure.
So, do you see any realistic bypass mechanism in terms of improving American infrastructure, especially in the big cities?
Michael: No, and there are two reasons for that. No. 1, let’s take a look at the long-term railroads. The railroads go through the center of town or even in the countryside, all along the railroads, the railroads brought business and all the businesses had been located as close to the railroad tracks as they could.
Factories with sightings off the railroad, hotels and especially right through the middle of town where you have the railway gates going up and down. In order to make a high-speed rail as in China, you need a dedicated roadway without trucks and cars, imagine a car going through a railway gate at 350 miles an hour.
So, when I would go from Beijing to Tianjin, here’s the high-speed rail, there’s one highway on one side, one highway on the other side. There’ll be underpasses. But there it goes straight now. How can you suppose you would have a straight Acela line from Washington up to Boston when all along the line, there’s all this real estate right along the line that has been built up? There’s no way you can get a dedicated roadway without having to tear down all of this real estate that’s on either side and the cost of making the current owners whole would be prohibitive. And anywhere you would go, that’s not in the center of the city, you would also have to have the problem that there’s already private property there.
And there’s no legal, constitutional way for such a physical investment to be made. China was able to make this investment because it was still largely rural. It wasn’t as built up along the railways. It didn’t have any particular area that was built up right where the railroad already was.
So certainly, any high-speed rail could not go where the current railways would be, and they’d have to go on somebody’s land. And, there’s also, what do you do if you want to get to New York and Long Island from New Jersey?
Sixty years ago, when I went into Wall Street, the cost of getting and transporting goods from California to Newark, New Jersey, was as large as from Newark right across the Hudson River to New York, not only because of the mafia and control of the local labor unions, but because of the tunnels. Right now, the tunnels from New Jersey to New York are broke, they are leaking, the subways in New York City, which continually break down because there was a hurricane a few years ago and the switches were made in the 1940s. The switches are 80 years old. They had water damage and the trains have to go at a crawl. But the city and state, because it is not collecting the real estate tax and other taxes and because ridership fell on the subways to about 20 percent, the city’s broke. They’re talking about 70 percent of city services being cut back. They’re talking about cutting back the subways to 40 percent capacity, meaning everybody will have to get in — when there’s still a virus and not many people are wearing masks, and there was no means of enforcing masks here.
So, there’s no way that you can rebuild the infrastructure because, for one thing the banking system here has subsidized for a hundred years junk economics saying you have to balance the budget. If the government creates credit it’s inflationary as if when banks create credit, it’s not inflationary. Well, the monetary effect is the same, no matter who creates the money. And so, Biden has already said that President Trump ran a big deficit, we’re going to run a bunch of surpluses or a budget balance. And he was advocating that all along. Essentially Biden is saying we have to increase unemployment by 20 percent, lower wages by 20 percent, shrink the economy by about 10 percent in order to, in order for the banks not to lose money.
“You’re going to price the American economy even further out of business because they say that public investment is socialism.”
And, we’re going to privatize but we are going to do it by selling the hospitals, the schools, the parks, the transportation to finance, to Wall Street finance capital groups. And so, you can imagine what’s going to happen if the Wall Street groups buy the infrastructure. They’ll do what happened to Chicago when it sold all the parking meters, they’ll say, OK, instead of 25 cents an hour, it’s now charged $3 an hour. Instead of a $2 for the subway, let’s make it $8.
You’re going to price the American economy even further out of business because they say that public investment is socialism. Well, it’s not socialism.It’s industrial capitalism. It’s industrialization, that’s basic economics. The idea of what, and how an economy works is so twisted academically that it’s the antithesis of what Adam Smith, John Stewart Mill and Marx all talked about. For them a free- market economy was an economy free of rentiers. Free of rent, it didn’t have any rent seeking. But now for the Americans, a free-market economy is free for the rentiers, free for the landlord, free for the banks to make a killing. And that is basically the class war back in business with a vengeance. That blocks and is preventing any kind infrastructure recovery. I don’t see how it can possibly take place.
Pepe: Well, based on what you just described, there is a process of turning the United States into a giant Brazil. In fact, this is what the Brazilian Finance Minister Paulo Guedes, a Pinochetista, as you know Michael, has been doing with the Brazilian economy for the past two years, privatizing everything and selling everything to big Brazilian interests and with lots of Wall Street interests involved as well. So, this is a recipe that goes all across the Global South as well. And it’s fully copied all across the Global South with no way out now.
Michael: Yes, and this is promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. And when I was brought down to Brazil to meet with the council of economic advisers under Lula, [Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former president of Brazil], they said, well the whole problem is that Lula’s been obliged to let the banks do the planning.
So, basically free markets and libertarianism is adopting central planning, but with central planning by the banks. America is a much more centrally planned economy than China. China is letting a hundred flowers bloom; America has concentrated the planning and the resource allocation in Wall Street. And that’s the central planning that is much more corrosive than any government planning, could be. Now the irony is that China’s sending its students to America to study economics. And, most of the Chinese I had talked to say, well we went to America to take economics courses because that gives us a prestige here in China.
I’m working now, with Chinese groups trying to develop a “reality economics” to be taught in China as different from American economics.
“America has concentrated the planning and the resource allocation in Wall Street. And that’s the central planning that is much more corrosive than any government planning, could be.”
Pepe: Exactly, because of what they study at Beijing University, Renmin or Tsinghua is not exactly what they would study in big American universities. Probably what they study in the U.S. is what not to do in China. When they go back to China, what they won’t be doing. It’s an object lesson for what to avoid.
Michael, I’d like to go back to what the BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa] had been discussing in the 2000s when Lula was still president of Brazil and many of his ideas deeply impressed, especially Hu Jintao at the time, which is bypassing the U.S. dollar. Well, at the moment obviously we’re still at 87 percent of international transactions still in U.S. dollars. So, we are very far away from it, but if you have a truly sovereign economy, which is the case of China, which we can say is the case of Russia to a certain extent and obviously in a completely different framework, Iran. Iran is a completely sovereign, independent economy from the West. The only way to try to develop different mechanisms to not fall into the rentier mind space would be to bypass the U.S. dollar.
Michael: Yes, for many reasons. For one thing the United States can simply print the dollars and lend to other countries and then say, now you have to pay us interest. Well, Russia doesn’t need American dollars. It can print its own rubles to provide labor. There’s no need for a foreign currency at all for domestic spending, the only reason you would have to borrow a foreign currency is to balance your exchange rate, or to finance a trade deficit. But China doesn’t have a trade deficit. And in fact, if China were to work to accept more dollars, Americans would love to buy into the Chinese market and make a profit there, but that would push up China’s exchange rate and that would make it more difficult for her to make its exports because the exchange rate would come up not because it’s exporting more but because it’s letting American dollars come in and push it up.
Well, fortunately, President Trump as if he works for the Chinese National Committee, said, look, we don’t want to really hurt China by pushing up its currency and we want to keep it competitive. So, I’m going to prevent American companies from lending money to China, I’m going to isolate it and so he’s helping them protect their economy. And in Russia he said, look Russia really needs to feed itself. And, there’s a real danger that when the Democrats come in, there are a lot of anti-Russians in the Biden administration. They may go to war. They may do to Russia what they tried to do to China in the ‘50s. Stop exporting food and grain. And only Canada was able to break the embargo. So, we’re going to impose sanctions on Russia. So immediately, what happened is Russia very quickly became the largest grain exporter in the world. And instead of importing cheese from the Baltics, it created its own cheese industry. So, Trump said look, I know that Russians followed the American idea of not having protective tariffs, they need protective tariffs. They’re not doing it. We’re going to help them out by just not importing from them and really helping them.
Pepe: Yeah. Michael, what do you think Black Rock wants from the Chinese? You know that they are making a few inroads at the highest levels? Of course, I’m sure you’re aware of that. And also, JP Morgan, Citibank, etc. What do they really want?
Michael: They’d like to be able to create dollars to begin to buy and make loans to real estate; let companies grow, let the real estate market grow and make capital gains.
The way people get wealthy today isn’t by making an income, it’s been by making a capital gain. Total returns are current income plus the capital gains. As for capital gains each year; the land value gains alone are larger than the whole GDP growth from year to year. So that’s where the money is, that’s where the wealth is. So, they are after speculative capital gains, they would like to push money into the Chinese stock market and real estate market. See the prices go up and then inflate the prices by buying in and then sell out at the high price. Pull the money out, get a capital gain and let the economy crash, I mean that’s the business plan.
Pepe: Exactly. But Beijing will never allow that.
Michael: Well, here’s the problem right now, they know that Biden is pushing militarily aggressive people in his cabinet. There’s one kind of overhead that China is really trying to avoid and that’s the military overhead because if you spend money on the military, you can’t spend it on the real economy. They’re very worried about the military and they say, how do we deter the Biden administration from actually trying a military adventure in the South China Sea or elsewhere? They said well, fortunately America is multi-layered. They don’t think of America as a group. They realize there’s a layer and they say, who’s going to represent our interests?
“There’s one kind of overhead that China is really trying to avoid and that’s the military overhead because if you spend money on the military, you can’t spend it on the real economy.”
Well, Blackstone and Wall Street are going to represent their interests. Then I think one of the Chinese officials last week gave a big speech on this very thing, saying look, our best hope in stopping America’s military adventurism in China is to have Wall Street acting as our support because after all, Wall Street is the main campaign contributor and the president works for the campaign contributors.
The politician works for the campaign contributors. They’re in it for the money! So fortunately, we have Wall Street on our side, we’ve got control of the political system and they’re not there to go to war so that helps explain why a month ago they let wholly-owned U.S. banks and bankers in. On the one hand, they don’t like the idea of somebody outside the government creating credit for reasons that the economy doesn’t need. If they needed it, the Bank of China would do it. They have no need for foreign currency to come in to make loans in domestic currency, out of China.
The only reason that they could do it is No. 1, it helps meet the World Trade Organization’s principles and, No. 2, especially during this formative few months of the Biden administration, it helps to have Wall Street saying; we can make a fortune in China, go easy on them and that essentially counters the military hawks in Washington.
Pepe: So, do you foresee a scenario when Black Rock starts wreaking havoc in the Shanghai stock exchange for instance?
Michael: It would love to do that. It would love to move things up and down. The money’s made by companies with the stock market going up and down; the zigzag. So of course, it wants to do a predatory zigzag. The question is whether China will impose a tax to stop this, all sorts of financial transactions. That’s what’s under discussion now. They know exactly what Black Rock wants to do because they have some very savvy billionaire Chinese advisers that are quite good. I can tell you stories, but I better not.
Pepe: Okay. If it’s not okay to tell it all, tell us part of the story then.
Michael: The American banks have been cultivating leading Chinese people by providing them enough money to make money here, that they think that, okay they will now try to make money in the same way in China and we can join in. It’s a conflict of systems again, between the finance capital system and industrial socialism. You don’t get any of this discussion in the U.S. press, which is why I read what you write because in the U.S. press, the neocons talk about the fake idea of Greek history and fake idea of the Thucydides’ problem of a country jealous of another country’s development.
There’s no jealousy between America and China. They’re different, they have their own way. We are going to destroy them. And if you look at the analogy that the Americans draw —and this is how the Pentagon thinks — with the war between Athens and Sparta. It’s hard to tell, which is which. Here you have Athens, a democracy backing other democracies and having the military support of the democracies and the military in these democracies all had to pay Athens protection money for the military support and that’s the money that Athens got to ostensibly support its navy and protection that built up all of the Athenian public buildings and everything else. So, that’s a democracy exploiting its allies, to enrich itself via the military. Then you have Sparta, which was funding all of the oligarchies, and it was helping the oligarchies overthrow democracies. Well, that was America too. So, America is both sides of the Thucydides war if the democracy is exploiting the fellow democracies and is the supporter of oligarchies in Brazil, Latin America, Africa and everyone else.
So, you could say the Thucydides problem was between two sides, two aspects of America and has nothing to do with China at all except, for the fact that the whole war was a war between economic systems. They’re acting as if somehow if only China did not export to us, we could be re-industrialized and somehow export to Europe and the Third World.
And as you and I have described, it’s over. We painted ourselves into such a debt corner that without writing down the debts, we’re in the same position that the Eurozone is in. There’s so much money that goes to the creditors to the top 1 percent or 5 percent that there is no money for capital investment, there is no money for growth. And, since 1980 as you know, real wages in America have been stable. All the growth has been in property owners and predators and the FIRE sector, the rest of the economy is in stagnation. And now the coronavirus has simply acted as a catalyst to make it very clear that the game is over; it’s time to move away from the homeowner economy to rentier economy, time for Blackstone to be the landlord. America wants to recreate the British landlord class and essentially what we’re seeing now is like the Norman invasion of England taking over the land and the infrastructure. That’s what Blackstone would love to do in China.
“There’s so much money that goes to the creditors to the top 1 percent or 5 percent that there is no money for capital investment, there is no money for growth.”
Pepe: Wow. I’m afraid that they may have a lot of leeway by some members of the Beijing leadership now, because as you know very well, it’s not a consensus in the political arena.
Michael: We’re talking about Volume II and III of Capital.
Pepe: Exactly. But you know, you were talking about debt. Coming back to that, in fact I just checked this morning, apparently global debt as it stands today is $277 trillion, which is something like 365 percent of global GDP. What does that mean in practice?
Michael: Yeah, well fortunately this is discussed in the 19th century and there was a word for that — fictitious capital — it’s a debt that can’t be paid, but you’ll keep it on the books anyway. And every country has this. You could say the question now, and The Financial Times just had an article a few days ago that China’s claims on Third World countries on the Belt and Road Initiative is fictitious capital, because how can it collect?
Well, China’s already thought of that. It doesn’t want money. It wants the raw materials. It wants to be paid in real things. But a debt that can’t be paid, can only be paid either by foreclosing on the debtors or by writing down the debts and obviously a debt that can’t be paid won’t be paid.
“Fictitious capital — it’s a debt that can’t be paid, but you’ll keep it on the books anyway. And every country has this.”
And so, you have not only Marx using the word fictitious capital. At the other end of the spectrum, you had Henry George talking about fictive capital. In other words, these are property claims that have no real capital behind them. There’s no capital that makes profit. That’s just a property claim for payment or a rentier claim for payment.
So, the question is, can you make money somehow without having any production at all, without having wages, without having profits, without any capital? Can you just have asset grabbing and buying-and-selling assets? And as long as you have the Federal Reserve in America, come in, Trump’s $10 trillion Covid program gave $2 trillion to the population at large with these $1,200 checks, that my wife and I got, and $8 trillion all just to buy stocks and bonds. None of this was to build infrastructure. None of this $8 trillion was to build a single factory. None of this 8 trillion was to employ a single worker. It was all just to support the prices of stocks and bonds, and to keep the illusion that the economy had not stopped growing. Well, it’s growing for the 5 percent. So, it’s all become fictitious. And if you look at the GDP as I said, it’s fictitious.
Pepe: And the most extraordinary thing is none of that is discussed in American media. There’s not a single word about what you would have been describing.
Michael: It’s not even discussed in academia. Our graduates at the university of Missouri at Kansas City, we’re all trained in Modern Monetary Theory. And as hired professors they have to be able to publish in the refereed journals and the refereed journals are all essentially controlled by the Chicago School. So, you have a censorship of the kind of ideas that we’re talking about. You can’t get it into the economic journals, so you can’t get it into the economics curriculum. So, where on earth are you going to get it? If you didn’t have the internet you wouldn’t be discussing at all. Most of my books sell mainly in China, more than in all the other countries put together so I can discuss these things there. I stopped publishing in orthodox journals so many years ago because it’s talking to the deaf.
“None of this $8 trillion was to build a single factory, employee, a single worker.”
Pepe: Absolutely. Yeah. Can I ask you a question about Russia, Michael? There is a raging debate in Russia for many years now between let’s say the Eurasianists and the Atlanticists. It involves of course, economic policy under Putin, industrial capitalism Russian style. The Eurasianists basically say that the central problem with Russia is how the Russian central bank is basically affiliated with all the mechanisms that you know so well, that it is an Atlanticist Trojan Horse inside the Russian economy. How do you see it?
Michael: Russia was brainwashed by the West when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. First of all, the IMF announced in advance that there was a big meeting in Houston with the IMF and the World Bank. And the IMF published all of its reports saying, first you don’t want inflation in Russia so let’s wipe out all of the Russian savings with hyperinflation, which they did. They then said, well now to cure the hyperinflation the Russian central bank needs a stable currency and you need a backup for the currency. You will need to back it with U.S. dollars.
“Russia was brainwashed by the West when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991.”
So, from the early 1990s, as you know, labor was going unpaid. The Russian central bank could have created the rubles to pay the domestic labor and to keep the factories in place. But, the IMF advisers from Harvard said, no you’ll have to borrow U.S. dollars. I met with people from the Hermitage Fund and the Renaissance Fund and others. We had meetings and I met with the investors. Russia was paying 100 percent interest for years to leading American financial institutions for money that it didn’t need and could have created itself. Russia was so dispirited with Stalinism that, essentially, it thought the opposite of Stalinism must be what they have in America.
“…to destroy a country, you don’t need an army anymore. All you have to do is teach it American economics.”
They thought that America was going to tell it how America got rich, but America didn’t want to tell Russia how it got rich, but instead wanted to make money off Russia. They didn’t get it. They trusted the Americans. They really didn’t understand that, industrial capitalism that Marx described had metamorphosized into finance capitalism and was completely different.
And that’s because Russia didn’t charge rent, it didn’t charge interest. I gave three speeches before the Duma, urging it to impose a land tax. Some of the people I noticed, Ed Dodson was there with us and we were all trying to convince Russia, don’t let this land be privatized. If you let it be privatized, then you’re going to have such high rents and housing costs in Russia that you’re not going to be able to essentially compete for an industrial growth. Well, the politician who brought us there, Viatcheslav Zolensky was sort of maneuvered out of the election by the American advisers.
The Americans put billions of dollars into essentially financing American propagandists to destroy Russia, mainly from the Harvard Institute of International Development. And essentially, they were a bunch of gangsters and the prosecutors in Boston were about to prosecute them.
The attorney general of Boston was going to bring a big case for Harvard against the looting of Russia and the corruption of Russia. And I was asked to organize and to bring a number of Russian politicians and industrialists over to say how this destroyed everything. Well, Harvard settled out of court and essentially that made the perpetrators the leading university people up there. (I’m associated with Harvard Anthropology Department, not the Economics Department.)
So, we never had a chance to bring my witnesses, and have our report on what happened, but I published for the Russian Academy of Sciences a long study of how all of this destruction of Russia was laid out in advance at the Houston meetings by the IMF. America went to the leading bureaucrats and said; look, we can make you rich why don’t you register the factories in your own name, and if you’re registered in your own name, you know, then you’ll own it. And then you can cash out. You can essentially sell, but obviously you can’t sell to the Russians because the IMF has just wiped out all of their savings.
You can only cash out by selling to the West. And so, the Russian stock market became the leading stock market in the world from 1994 with the Norilsk Nickel and the seven bankers in the bank loans for shares deal through 1997. And, I had worked for a firm Scutter Stevens and, the head adviser, a former student of mine didn’t want to invest in Russia because she said, this is just a rip off, it’s going to crash. She was fired for not investing. They said look, we know that’s going to crash. That’s the whole idea, it’s going to crash. We can make a mint off it before the crash. And then when it crashes, we can make another mint by selling short and then all over again. Well, the problem is that the system that was put in with the privatization that’s occurred, how do you have Russia’s wealth used to develop its own industry and its own economy like China was doing. Well, China has rules for all of this, but Russia doesn’t have rules, it’s really all centralized, it’s President Putin that keeps it this way.
Well, this was the great fear of the West. When you had Mikhail Gorbachev beginning to plan to do pretty much what is done today, to restrain private capital, the IMF said hold off. We’re not going to make any loans to stabilize the Russian currency until you remove Mr. Primakov.
The U.S. said we won’t deal with Russia until you remove him. So, he was pushed out and he was probably the smartest guy at the time there. So, they thought [President Vladimir] Putin was going to be sort of the patsy. And he almost single-handedly, holding the oligarchs in and saying, look, you can keep your money as long as you do exactly what the government would do. You can keep the gains as long as you’re serving the public interest.
But none of this resulted into a legal system, a tax system, and a system where the government actually does get most of the benefits. Russia could have emerged in 1990 as one the most competitive economies in Eurasia by giving all of the houses to its people instead of giving Norilsk Nickel and the oil companies to Yukos. It could have given everybody their own house and their own apartment, the same thing in the Baltics. And instead it didn’t give the land out to the people. And Russians were paying 3 percent of their income for housing in 1990. And rent is the largest element in every household’s budget.
“Russia could have emerged in 1990 as one the most competitive economies in Eurasia by giving all of the houses to its people.”
So, Russia could have had low-price labor. It could have financed all of its capital investment for the government by taxing, collecting the rising rental value. Instead, Russian real estate was privatized on credit and it was even worse in the Baltics.
In Latvia, where I was research director for the Riga Graduate School of Law, Latvia borrowed primarily from Swedish banks. And so, in order to buy a house, you had to borrow from Swedish banks. And they said, well, we’re not going to lend in the Latvian currency because it can go down. So, you have a choice; Swiss Francs or German Marks or U.S. Dollars. And so, all of this rent was paid in foreign currency. There came an outflow that essentially drained all the Baltic economies. Latvia lost 20 percent of its population. Estonia and Lithuania followed suit.
And of course, the worst hit by neo-liberalism was Russia. As you know, President Putin said that neo-liberalism cost Russia more of its population than World War II. And you know that to destroy a country, you don’t need an army anymore. All you have to do is teach it American economics.
Pepe: Yes, I remember well, I arrived in Russia in the winter of 91 coming from China. So, I transited from the Chinese miracle. In fact, a few days after Deng Xiaoping’s famous Southern tour when he went to Guangzhou and Shenzhen. And that was the kick for the 1990s boom, in fact a few years before the handover, and then I took the Trans-Siberian and I arrived in Moscow a few days after the end, in fact, a few weeks after the end of the Soviet Union.
But yeah, I remember the Americans arrived almost at the exact minute, wasn’t it, Michael? I think they already were there in the spring of 1992. If I’m not mistaken.
Michael: The Houston meeting was in 1990. But all before that already in, 1988 and 1989, there was a huge outflow of embezzlement money via Latvia. The assistant dean of the university who ended up creating Nordex, essentially the money was all flying out because Ventspils in Latvia, was where Russian oil was exported and it was all fake invoicing. So, the Russian kleptocrats basically made their money off false export invoicing, ostensibly selling it for one price and having the rest paid abroad and, this was all organized through Latvia and the man who did it later moved to Israel and finally gave a billion dollars back to Russia so that he went on to live safely for the rest of his life in Israel.
Pepe: Well, the crash of the ruble in 1998 was what, roughly one year after the crash of the baht and the whole Asian financial crisis, no? It was interlinked of course, but let me see if I have a question for you, in fact, I’m just thinking out loud now. If the economies of Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, the case of South Korea and Russia, were more integrated at the time as they are trying to integrate now, do you think that the Asian financial crisis would have been preventable in 1997?
Michael: Well, look at what happened in Malaysia with Mohammad Mahathir. Malaysia avoided it. So of course, it was preventable, and they had the capital controls. All you would have needed was to do what Malaysia did. But you needed an economic theory for that.
And essentially the current mode of warfare is to conquer the brains of a country to shape how people think and how they perceive the economy. And if you can twist their view into an unreality economics, where they think that you’re there to help them not to take money out of them, then you’ve got them hooked. That was what happened in Asia. Asia thought it was getting rich off the dollars inflows and then the IMF and all the creditors pulled the plug, crash the industry. And now that all of a sudden you had a crash, they bought up Korean industry and other South Asian industries at giveaway prices.
That’s what you do. You lend the money; you pull the plug. You then let them go under and you pick up the pieces. That’s what Blackstone did after the Obama depression began, when Obama saved the banks, not the constituency, the mortgage borrowers. Essentially that’s Blackstone’s modus operandi to pick up distressed prices at a bankruptcy sale, but you need to lend money and then crash it in order to make that work.
Pepe: Michael, I think we have only five minutes left. So, I would expect you to go on a relatively long answer and I’m really dying for it. It’s about debt, it about the debt trap. And it’s about the New Silk Roads, the Belt and Road Initiative, because I think rounding up our discussion and coming back to the theme of debt and global debt.
The No. 1 criticism apart from the demonization of China that you hear from American media and a few American academics as well against the Belt and Road is that it’s creating a debt trap for Southeast Asian nations, Central Asian nations and nations in Africa, etc…. Obviously, I expect you to debunk that, but the framework is there is no other global development project as extensive and as complex as Belt and Road, which as you know very well was initially dreamed up by the Ministry of Commerce. Then they sold it more or less to Xi Jinping who got the geopolitical stamp on it, announcing it, simultaneously, (which was a stroke of genius) in Central Asia in Astana and then in Southeast Asia in Jakarta. So, he was announcing the overland corridors through the heartland and the Maritime Silk Road at the same time.
At the time people didn’t see the reach and depth of all that. And now of course, finally the Trump administration woke up and saw what was in play, not only across Eurasia but reaching Africa and even selected parts of Latin America as well. And obviously the only sort of criticism, and it’s not even a fact-based criticism, that I’ve seen about the Belt and Road is it’s creating a debt trap because as you know Laos is indebted, Sri Lanka is indebted, Kyrgyzstan is indebted etc. So, how do you view Belt and Road within the larger framework of the West and China, East Asia and Eurasia relations? And how would you debunk misconceptions created, especially in the U S that this is a debt trap.
Six proposed corridors of Belt and Road Initiative, showing Italy inside circle, on maritime blue route. (Lommes, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Michael: There are two points to answer there. The first is how the Belt and Road began. And as you pointed out, the Belt and Road began, when China said, what is it we need to grow and how do we grow within our neighboring countries so we don’t have to depend upon the West, and we don’t have to depend on sea trade that can be shut down? How do we get to roads instead of seas in a way that we can integrate our economy with the neighboring economies so that there can be mutual growth?
So, this was done pretty much on industrial engineering grounds. Here’s where you need the roads and the railroads. And then how do we finance it? Well, The Financial Times article, last week, said didn’t the Chinese know that [with past] railroad development, they’ve all gone broke? The Panama Canal went broke, you know, the first few times there were European railway investment in Latin America in the 19th century, that all went broke.
Well, what they don’t get is China’s aim was not to make a profit off the railroads.
The railroads were built to be part of the economy. They don’t want to make profit. It was to make the real economy grow, not to make profits for the owners of the railroad stocks. The Western press can’t imagine that you’re building a railroad without trying to make money out of it.
Then you get to the debt issue.
Countries only have a debt crisis if their debt is in a foreign currency. The first way that the United States gained power was to fight against its allies. The great enemy of America was England and it made the British block their currency in the 1940s. And so, India and other countries, that had all these currencies holdings in sterling, were able to convert it all into dollars.
The whole move of the U.S. was to denominate world debt in dollars. So that No. 1, U.S. banks would end up with the interest in financing the debt. And No. 2, the United States could, by using the debt leverage, control domestic politics.
Well, as you’re seeing right now in Argentina, for instance, Argentina is broke because it owes foreign-dollar debt. When I started the first Third World bond fund in 1990 at Scutter Stevens, Brazil and China and Argentina were paying 45 percent interest per year, 45 percent per year in dollars debt. Yet we tried to sell them in America. No American would buy. We went to Europe, no European buy this debt. And so, we worked with Merrill Lynch and Merrill Lynch was able to make an offshore fund in the Dutch West Indies and all of the debt was sold to the Brazilian ruling class in the central bank and the Argentinian bankers in the ruling class, we thought oh, that’s wonderful.
We know that they’re going to pay the foreign Yankee Dollars debt because the Yankee Dollars debt is owed to themselves. They’re the Yankees! They’re the client oligarchy. And you know, from Brazil client oligarchy is, you know, they’re cosmopolitan, that’s the word. So, the problem is that on the Belt and Road, how did these other countries pay the debt to China?
Well, the key there again is the de-dollarization, and one way to solve it is since we’re trying to get finance out of the picture, we’re doing something very much like, Japan did with Canada in the 1960s. It made loans to develop Canadian copper mines taking its payment, not in Canadian dollars, that would have pushed up the yen’s exchange rate, but in copper.
So, China says, you know you don’t have to pay currency for this debt. We didn’t build a railroad to make a profit and you want, we can print all the currency we want. We don’t need to make a profit. We made the Belt and Road because it’s part of our geopolitical attempt to create what we need to be prosperous and have a prosperous region. So, these are self-reinforcing mutual gain. Well, so that’s what the West doesn’t get — mutual gain? Are we talking anthropology? What do you mean mutual? This is capitalism! So, the West doesn’t understand what the original aim of the Belt and Road was, and it wasn’t to make a profitable railroad to enable people to buy and sell railway stocks. And it wasn’t to make toll roads to sell off to Goldman Sachs, you know. We’re dealing with two different economic systems, and it’s very hard for one system to understand the other system because of the tunnel vision that you get when you get a degree in economics.
“We’re dealing with two different economic systems, and it’s very hard for one system to understand the other system because of the tunnel vision that you get when you get a degree in economics.”
Pepe: Belt and Road loans are long-term and at very low interest and they are renegotiable. They are renegotiating with the Pakistanis all the time for instance.
Michael: China’s intention is not to repeat an Asia crisis of 1997. It doesn’t gain anything by forcing a crisis because it’s not trying to come in and buy property at a discount at a distressed sale. It has no desire to create a distressed sale. So obviously, the idea is the capacity to pay. Now, this whole argument occurred in the 1920s, between [John Maynard] Keynes and his opponents that wanted to collect German reparations and, Keynes made it very clear. What is the capacity to pay? It’s the ability to export and the ability to obtain foreign currency. Well, China’s not looking for foreign currency. It is looking for economic returns but the return is to the whole society, the return isn’t from a railroad. The return is for the entire economy because it’s looking at the economy as a system.
The way that neoliberalism works, it divides the economy in parts, and it makes every part trying to make a gain, and if you do that, then you don’t have any infrastructure that’s lowering the cost for the other parts. You have every part fighting for itself. You don’t look at in terms of a system the way China’s looking at it. That’s the great advantage of Marxism, you’ll look at the system, not just the parts.
Pepe: Exactly and this is at the heart of the Chinese concept of a community with a shared future for mankind, which is the approximate translation from Mandarin. So, we compare community with a shared future for mankind, which is, let’s say the driving force between the idea of Belt and Road, expanded across Eurasia, Africa and Latin America as well with our good old friends’, “greed is good” concept from the eighties, which is still ruling America apparently.
Michael: And the corollary is that non-greed is bad.
Pepe: Exactly and non-greed is evil.
Michael: I see. I think we ran out of time. I do. I don’t know if Alanna wants to step in to wrap it up.
Michael: There may be somebody who has a question.
Pepe: Somebody has a question? That’ll be fantastic.
Alanna: There is a question from Ed Dodson. He wanted to know why there are these ghost cities in China? And who’s financing all this real estate that’s developed, but nobody’s living there? We’ve all been hearing about that. So, what is happening with that?
Michael: Okay. China had most of its population living in the countryside and it made many deals with Chinese landholders who have land rights, and they said, if you will give up your land right to the community, we will give you free apartment in the city that you could rent out.
So, China has been building apartments in cities and trading these basically in exchange to support what used to be called a rural exodus. China doesn’t need as many farmers on the land as it now has, and the question is how are you going to get them into cities? So, China began building these cities and many of these apartments are owned by people who’ve got them in exchange for trading their land rights. The deals are part of the rural reconstruction program.
Alanna: Do you think it was a good deal? Vacant apartments everywhere.
Pepe: You don’t have ghost cities in Xinjiang for instance, Xinjiang is under-populated, it’s mostly desert. And it’s extremely sensitive to relocate people to Xinjiang. So basically, they concentrated on expanding Urumqi. When you arrive in Urumqi it is like almost like arriving in, Guangzhou. It’s enormous. It’s a huge generic city in the middle of the desert. And it’s also a high-tech Mecca, which is something that very few people in the West know. And is the direct link between the eastern seaboard via Belt and Road to Central Asia.
Last year I was on an amazing trip. I went to the three borders, the Tajik-Xinjiang border, Kyrgiz-Xinjiang border and the Kazakh-Xinjiang border, which is three borders in one. It’s a fascinating area to explore and specially to talk to the local populations, the Kyrgiz, the Kazakhs and the Tajiks.
How do they see the Belt and Road directly affecting their lives from now on?
So, you don’t see something spectacular for instance, in the Xinjiang – Kazakh boarder, there is one border for the trucks, lots of them like in Europe, crossing from all points, from Central Asia to China and bringing Chinese merchandise to Central Asia.
There’s the train border, which is a very simple two tracks and the pedestrian border, which is very funny because you have people arriving in buses from all parts of Central Asia. They stop on the Kazakh border. They take a shuttle, they clear customs for one day, they go to a series of shopping malls on the Chinese side of the border. They buy like crazy, shop till it drops, I don’t know for 12 hours? And then they cross back the same day because the visa is for one day. They step on their buses and they go back.
So, for the moment it’s sort of a pedestrian form of Belt and Road, but in the future, we’re going to have high-speed rail. We’re going to have, well the pipelines are already there as Michael knows, but it’s fascinating to see on the spot. You see the closer integration; you see for instance Uyghurs traveling back and forth. You know, Uyghurs that have families in Kyrgizstan for instance, I met some Uyghurs in Kyrgyzstan who do the back-and-forth all the time. And they said, there’s no problem. They are seen as businessmen so there’s no interference. There are no concentration camps involved, you know, but you have to go to these places to see how it works on the ground and with Covid, that’s the problem for us journalists who travel, because for one year we cannot go anywhere and Xinjiang was on my travel list this year, Afghanistan as well, Mongolia.
These are all parts of Belt and Road or future parts of Belt and Road, like Afghanistan. The Chinese and the Russians as well; they want to bring Afghanistan in a peace process organized by Asians themselves without the United States, within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, because they want Afghanistan to be part of the intersection of Belt and Road and Eurasian Economic Union. This is something Michael knows very well. You don’t see this kind of discussions in the American media for instance, integration of Eurasia on the ground, how it’s actually happening.
Michael: That’s called cognitive dissonance.
Alanna: To try to understand it gets you cognitive dissonance.
Pepe: Oh yeah, of course. And obviously you are a Chinese agent, a Russian agent. And so, I hear that all the time. Well, in our jobs we hear that all the time. Especially, unfortunately from our American friends.
Alanna: Okay. I know you have other things to do. This has been fabulous. I want to thank you so much, both of you, uh, with so easy to get attendance for this webinar. There were 20 people in five minutes enrolled and in two days we were at capacity. So, I know there are many more people who would love to hear you talk another time, whenever you two are so willing. And I think you both got much out of your first conversation in person. Everybody listening knows these two wonderful gentlemen, they have written more than 10 books, and they have traveled all over the world. They are on the top of geopolitical and geoeconomic analysis, and they are caring, loving people. So, you can see that these are the people we need to be listening to and understanding all around the world.
This was part ONE.
Now for the follow up; part TWO…
INDISPENSABLE READS: In Quest of a Multi-Polar World
Michael Hudson and Pepe Escobar resume their conversation about a global monetary system that appears headed for divorce.
“Free market meant giving power to the monopolists, to the oppressors, to violence. A free market was where armies can come in, take over your country, impose a client dictatorship like [Gen. Augusto] Pinochet in Chile or the neo-Nazis in the Ukraine. And you call that a free market…”
Michael Hudson: Fifty ago, I wrote Super Imperialism about basically how America dominates the world financially and gets a free ride.
I wrote it right after America went off gold in 1971, when the Vietnam War, which was responsible for the entire balance of payments deficit, forced the country to go off gold. And everybody at that time worried the dollar was going to go down. There’d be hyperinflation. And what happened was something entirely different.
Once there was no gold, America strong-armed its allies to invest in U.S. Treasury bonds because their central banks don’t buy companies. They don’t buy raw materials. All they could buy is other central bank’s treasury bonds. So, all of a sudden, the only thing that other people could buy with all the dollars coming in were U.S. Treasury securities.
And the securities they bought essentially were to finance yet more war making and the balance of payments deficit from war and the 800 military bases America has around the world. And the largest customer, I think we discussed it before, are the Defense Department and the CIA that looked at it [Super Imperialism] as a how-to-do it book. Well, that was 50 years ago.
And what I’ve done is not only re-edit the book and add more information that’s come out, but I’ve picked up the last 50 years and how it’s absolutely transformed the whole world. And it’s a new kind of imperialism.
There was still a view 50 years ago that imperialism was [essentially] economic. And this is the view that there’s still a rivalry for instance, between America and China or America and Europe and other countries.
But I think the whole world has changed so much in the last 50 years that what we have now is not really so much a conflict between America and China or America and Russia, but between a financial system economy run by finance and an economy run by governments — democratic or less democratic, but certainly a mixed economy.
Well, everything that made industrial capitalism rich, everything that made America so strong in the 19th century, through its protective tariffs, through its public infrastructure investment all the way down through World War II and the aftermath. We had a mixed economy in America, and that was very balanced. Europe had a mixed economy. Every economy since Babylon and Rome has been a mixed economy, but in America you’ve had since 1980 something entirely different. That was not foreseen by anybody because it seemed to be so disruptive.
And what that was, was the financial sector saying we need liberty and by liberty, meaning we have to take planning and subsidy and economic policy and tax policy out of the hands of government. And put it in the hands of Wall Street.
And so, libertarianism and free market is a centralized economy that is centralized in the hands of the financial centers, Wall Street, the City of London, the Paris Bourse. And what you’re having today is the attempt of the financial sector to take the role that the landlord class had in Europe, from feudal times through the 19th century. It’s a kind of resurgence.
If you look at the whole last 200 years of economic theory — from Adam Smith and, Henry George and Marx, onward — the whole idea was that everybody expected a mixed economy to become more and more productive and to free itself from the landlords, to free itself from banking to make land a public utility.
That was the tax base to make finance basically something public, and government would decide who gets the funding and thus, the idea of finance in the public sector was going to be pretty much what it is in China. You create bank credit in order to finance capital investment in factories. It means the production of machinery, agricultural modernization, of transport, infrastructure of high-speed trains of ports and all of that.
But in the United States and England, you have finance becoming something completely different. Banks don’t lend money to factories. They don’t want money to make means of production. They make money to take over other assets. Eighty percent of bank loans are mortgage loans to transfer the ownership of real estate. And of course that’s what created a middle class in the United States.
The middle class was able to buy its own housing, it didn’t have to pay rent to landlords or absentee owners or warlords and their descendants in England and Europe. They could buy their own. What nobody realized is that if you borrowed the money to take a mortgage, there’s still an economic rental value that is not paid to the landlords. It’s paid to the banks. And so, in the Western civilizations in America and Europe, the banks have played the role that the landlords played a hundred years ago.
And just as the landlord is trying to do everything they could through the House of Lords in England and the upper houses of government in Europe, they’re trying to block any kind of democratic government. And the fight really is against government that would do anything that is not controlled by the 1 percent, by the banks. Essentially the merger between finance insurance and real estate; the FIRE sector. So, you have almost a relapse of capitalism in the West back into feudalism, but feudalism with a financialized twist much more than it was in medieval times.
The fight against China, the fear of China is that you can’t do to China, what you did to Russia. America would love for there to be a [former Russian President Boris] Yeltsin figure in China to say, just give all of the railroads that you’ve built, the high-speed rail, the wealth, all the factories to individuals. And let the individuals run everything and, then we’ll lend them the money, or we’ll buy them out and then we can control them financially.
And China’s not letting that happen. And Russia stopped that from happening. And the fury in the West is that somehow, the American financial system is unable to take over foreign resources, foreign agriculture. It is left only with military means of grabbing them as we are seeing in the near East. And you’re seeing in the Ukraine right now.
Pepe Escobar: Well, as an introduction, Michael that was perfect because now we have the overall framework — geo-economic and historically — at least for the past 70 years.
I have a series of questions for you. I was saving one of these for the end, but I think I should start really the Metallica way. Let’s go heavy metal for a start, right?
So considering what you describe as a new kind of imperialism and the fact that this sort of extended free lunch cannot apply anymore because sovereigns around the world, especially Russia and China, I tried to formulate the idea that there are only three real sovereign powers on the planet, apart from the hegemon; Russia, China, and Iran, these three, which happen to be the main hub and the main focus of not only of the New Silk Roads but of the Eurasia integration process, they are actively working for some sort of change of the rules that predominated for the past 70 years.
So my first question to you would be, do you see any realistic possibility of a, sort of a Bretton Woods 2.0, which would imply the end of the dollar hegemony as we know it, and petrodollar recycling on and on and on, with the very important presence of that oily hacienda in the lands of Arabia. And do you think this is possible considering that President [Vladimir] Putin himself only a few days ago reiterated once again that the U.S. is no longer agreement- capable? So that destroys already the possibility of the emergence of the new rules of the game. But do you think this is still realistically possible?
Michael: I certainly do not see any repetition of a Bretton Woods because as I described in Super Imperialism, the whole of Bretton Woods was designed to make American control over Britain, over Europe total. Bretton Woods was a U.S.-centered system to prevent England from maintaining its empire. That’s okay. To prevent France from maintaining its empire and for America to take over the sterling area and, essentially with the World Bank, to prevent other countries from becoming independent and feeding themselves, to make sure that they supported plantation agriculture, not land reform. The one single fight of the World Bank was to prevent land reform and to make sure that America, and foreign investors, would take over the agriculture of these countries.
And very often people think of capitalism, certainly in the sense that Marx described in Volume One, capitalism is the exploitation of wage labor by employers. But capitalism also is an appropriation of the land rent, the agricultural rent, the natural resource rent, the oil and the mineral rent. And the idea of Bretton Woods was to make sure that other countries could not impose capital controls to prevent American finance coming in and appropriating their resources, of making the loans to foreign governments so that governments would not create their own money to promote their own social development but would have to borrow from the World Bank and the IMF, which essentially meant from the Pentagon and the State Department, in U.S. dollars.
And they would dollarize their economies and the economies would all be sucked. The economic rents from oil, agriculture, mining would all be sucked into the United States. That kind of Bretton Woods cannot be done again. And since Bretton Woods was an idea of centralizing the world’s economic surplus in a single country, the United States, no, that can never be done again.
What is happening? You mentioned the world of free, free lunch, and that’s what was a theme of Super Imperialism, when America issues dollars, for these all end up in central banks and they hold the dollars as a surplus. That means what can they do? All they can do is really lend them to the United States. America got a free lunch. It could spend and spend on its military, on bumping up corporate takeovers of other countries. The dollars have come in and foreign countries couldn’t cash them in for gold. They had nothing to cash them into. And all they could do is finance the U.S. budget deficit by buying Treasury bills.
That’s the irony now, what has happened in the last few years in the fight against Russia and China is America has killed the free lunch because it said, okay, now we’re going to have sanctions against Russia and China. We’re going to all of a sudden grab whatever money you have in foreign banks like we grabbed Venezuela’s money. Let’s go, we’re going to excommunicate you from the bank clearing system. So, you can’t use banking. We’re going to put sanctions against banks that deal with you.
So obviously Russia and China said, okay, we can’t deal with the dollar anymore, because the United States just crammed them. And if we do have dollars, we’re just going to hold everything in reserves and lending to the United States, the dollars that it’s going to spend building more military bases around us to make us waste our money on monetary spending. And so, America itself by the way, in fighting against China and Russia, has ended the free lunch.
“In America you’ve had since 1980 something entirely different. That was not foreseen by anybody because it seemed to be so disruptive.”
And now, Russia and China as you pointed out, are de-dollarizing, they’re trading in each other’s currency. They’re being the exact opposite of everything that Bretton Woods tried to create. They’re trying to create independence from the United States.
If Bretton Woods is this dependence on the United States, a centralized system dependent ultimately on Wall Street financial planners then, what China and Russia are trying to create is an economy that’s not run by the financial sector, but it is run by, let’s say, industrial and economic engineering and saying, what kind of an economy do we need in order to raise living standards and wages and self-sufficiency and preserve the environment, what is needed for the ideal world that we want?
Well, in order to do that, you’re going to have to have a lot of infrastructure. And in America, infrastructure is all privatized. You have to make a profit. And once you have infrastructure, a railroad or electric utility, like you see in Texas recently, it’s a monopoly. Infrastructure, for 5,000 years, Europe, the near East, Asia was always kept in the public domain that goes, if you’ll give it to private owners, they’ll charge a monopoly rent.
Well, the idea that China has is, “OK, we’re going to provide the educational system freely and let everybody try to get an education.” In America if you have an education, you have to go into debt for the banks for between $50,000 and $200,000. And whatever you make you’re going to end up paying the bank while in China, if you give free education, the money that they earned from the education will be spent into the economy, buying the goods and services that they produce, and the economy will be expanding, not shrinking, not having it all sucked out into the financial banks that are financing the education, same thing with the railroads, same things with the healthcare.
If you provide healthcare freely then the employers do not have to pay for the healthcare because that’s provided freely. In the United States, if the corporation and the employees have to pay for healthcare, that means that the employees have to be paid a much higher wage in order to afford the healthcare, in order to afford the transportation that gets him to work, in order to afford the auto loans, in order to drive to work, all of this is free, or subsidized in other countries, who create their own credit.
In the United States and Europe, governments feel that they have to borrow from the wealthy people in a bond and pay interest. In China they say, “we don’t have to borrow from a wealthy class. We can simply print the money.” That’s Modern Monetary Theory. As Donald Trump has explained in the United States, we can print whatever we want. Dick Cheney said, deficits don’t matter. We can just print it. And of course, Stephanie Kelton and my colleagues in MMT at Kansas City for many years have been saying.
“The economy has been saturated and Reaganized and the result is a fight of economic systems against China and Russia.”
The banks fear this because they say, “Wait a minute, Modern Monetary Theory means it’s not feudal monetary theory. We want feudal monetary theory. We want the rich people to be able to have a choke point on the economy that you can’t survive unless you borrow from us and pay us interest. We want the choke points.” That’s called economic rent.
And so, you have the West turning into a rent-extractive economy, a rent-seeking economy. And you’ll have the whole ideal of Russia, China, and other countries being the ideal of not only Marx, but Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Ricardo. The whole of classical economics was to free economies from economic rent. And the American economy is all about extracting rent through the real estate sector, the financial sector, the health insurance sector, the monopolies and infrastructure sector.
The economy has been saturated and Reaganized and the result is a fight of economic systems against China and Russia. So, it’s not simply that, there’s a fight between who makes the best computer chips and the best iPhones. It’s: are we going to have a fallback of civilization back into feudalism, back into control by a narrow class at the top of the economy, that 1 percent? Or are we going to have the ideal of democratic industrialization that used to be called socialism but it was also called capitalism. Industrial capitalism was socialism; it was socialized medicine, it was socialized infrastructure, it was socialized schooling. And so, the fight against socialism is a fight against industrial capitalism, a fight against democracy, a fight against prosperity.
That’s why what you’re seeing now is a fight for what direction civilization will go into. And you can’t have a Bretton Woods for a single kind of organization because the United States would never join that civilization. The United States calls a country trying to make its labor force prosperous, educated and healthy instead of sick with shorter lifespans, they call it communism or socialism.
Well, it can call it whatever it wants, but that’s the dynamic we are talking about.
Pepe: Well, you put it very, I would say starkly. The opposition between two completely different systems, what the Chinese are proposing, including, from productive capitalism to trade and investment all across Eurasia and beyond, including Africa, parts of Latin America as well. And the rentier obsession of the 0.01 percent that controls the U.S. financial system. In terms of facts on the ground, are we going slowly but surely and ominously towards an absolute divorce by a system based on rentier, ultra-financialization, which is the American system, not productive capitalism at all.
I was going through a small list of what the U.S. exports, it’s not much as you know, better than I do. Agricultural products but always privileging U.S. farmers. Hollywood, we are all hostages of Hollywood all over the world. Pop culture? That’s not the pop culture that used to be absolutely impregnable and omniscient during the ‘60s, the 70s, during the Madonna, Michael Jackson era in the ‘80s, right? Infotech. And that’s where a big bet comes in. And this is maybe the most important American export at the moment because American Big Tech controls social networks all over the planet. Big Pharma. Now we see the power of Big Pharma with the whole Covid operations, right? But Boeing prefers to invest in financial engineering instead of building decent products. Right?
So, in terms of a major superpower, the hyperpower, that’s not much, and obviously buyers all over the world already noticed that. So, China is proposing the New Silk Roads, which is a foreign-policy strategy, and a trade, investment and sustainable development strategy. [It’s] applied not only to the whole of Eurasia, but Eurasia and beyond to grow a great deal of the Global South and that’s why we have Global South partners to the New Silk Roads — 130-and-counting as we speak.
So, the dichotomy could not be clearer. What will the 0.001 percent do? Because they don’t have anything seductive to sell. To all those nations in the Global South to start with; the new version of the Non-Aligned Movement, NAM, the countries that are already part of New Silk Road projects, not even to Europe and this, we could see by the end of last year when the China-European Union agreement was more or less sealed. It’s probably going to be sealed in 2021 for good.
And at the same time, we had the Regional Economic Comprehensive Partnership, RCEP, with the ASEAN 10, my neighbors here, the Association of South East Asian Nations, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. So, when you have the China-EU deal, and when you have RCEP, you have China as the number one trade partner on the planet, no competition whatsoever.
And obviously every one of these players wants to do business with China. And they’re privileging doing business with China to doing business with the U.S., especially with a country that once again, according to President Putin, is non-agreement capable. So, Michael, what is your key geo-economic view of the next steps? Are we going towards the divorce of the American financialization system and the Eurasia-and-beyond integration system?
Michael: Well, you you’ve made the whole point clear. There is incompatibility between a rentier society controlled by the finance and real estate interests and military interests and an industrial democracy.
Industry in England and Europe in the 19th century — the whole fight for democratic reform to increase the role of the House of Commons against the House of Lords in England and the lower house in Europe — was a fight to get labor on the side of industry [and] to get rid of the landlord class. And it was expected that … capitalism [would then be] free of the landlord class, free of something that wasn’t really capitalism at all, it was a carry-over from feudalism. Once you free capitalism, you wouldn’t have this overhead of the idle 1 percent, only consuming resources and going to war, anymore.
And then World War I changed all of that . … Already, in the late 19th century, the landlords and the banks fought back, and they fought back largely through the Austrian School of individualism and the English marginalist and they called it freedom. They call it free markets. Free market meant giving power to the monopolists, to the oppressors, to violence. A free market was where armies can come in, take over your country, impose a client dictatorship like [Gen. Augusto] Pinochet in Chile or the neo-Nazis in the Ukraine. And you call that a free market.
The free world was a world centrally planned by the American military and finance together. So, it’s Orwellian, and the dynamic of this world is shrinking because it’s polarizing and you’ve seen with the Covid pandemic in the United States, the economy has polarized much more sharply than ever before between the 1 percent, the 10 percent and the rest of the economy.
Well, as opposed to that here, you have economies that are not run by a rentier class, that do not have a banking class and the landlord class controlling the economy, but a partnership. The kind of thing you had in Germany in the late 19th century, government industry and labor, all working together to design how we provide the financing for industry so that it can provide not only industrial capital formation, but public funding for us to build infrastructure and uplift the population.
What China is doing is what made America rich in the 19th century, what made Germany rich. It’s exactly the same logical engineering plan. Now, this plan because it’s based on economic expansion, and environmental preservation and economic balance instead of concentration, this is going to be a growing economy. So, you’re having a growing economy outside of the United States and a shrinking economy in the States and its satellites in Europe.
“What China is doing is what made America rich in the 19th century, what made Germany rich.”
Europe had a choice; either it could shrink, and be American, or it could join the growth. Europe has decided unanimously, we don’t want to grow. We want to be constant. We want our banks to take over just like in America. That’s a free market because Americans have found out, and I’m told by American officials we just buy the European politicians, they’re bribable. That’s why when president Putin says, America and Europe are not agreement capable, it means they’re just in it for the money. There is no ideology there. There is no idea of the overall social benefit. The system is “how can I get rich, and you can get rich by being bribed?” That’s why you go into politics. As you can tell in America with the Supreme Court law saying politics can be personally financed.
So, you’re having two incompatible systems and, they’re on different trajectories and if you have a system that is shrinking like the West and growing in the East, you have resentment. People who obtain their wealth in crooked ways, or without working — by inheritance, by crime, by exploitation — they will fight like anything to keep that. Whereas people who actually create wealth, labor, capital, they, they’re not willing to fight, they just want to be creative. So you have a destructive military force, in the West. And, basically a productive, economic growth force. And in Eurasia, the clash now is occurring largely in Ukraine. You’re having the United States back the neo-Nazis.
Pepe: The old Nazi movement!
Michael: It’s the same swastika-carrying group that threatened Russia in World War II. And this is like waving a red flag before a bull. Putin continues to remind the Russians. We know what happened with the 22 million Russians that died, in World War II with Europe coming in. We’re not going to let it happen again.
And you can be certain Russia is not going to be sucked into invading the Ukraine. The United States has its military advisers in the Ukraine. Now, the Vineyard of the Saker has a very good report on that. America’s trying to needle Russia into fighting back against the terrorist groups and Russia has no desire at all to. There’s nothing that Russia has to gain by taking it over. It’s essentially a bankrupt country.
The United States is trying to provoke a response so it can say Russia is attacking the West. The result will probably be that Russia will very simply provide arms to the Eastern Ukrainians to fight back the invasion. And you’re going to have a wasteland in Western Ukraine and Poland. And this wasteland will be the new buffer state with Europe. Already you have, maybe 10 percent of the Ukrainians having moved to Russia and the east. [Another] 10 percent are now plumbers in England and Europe, working. They’re beginning to look like Latvia and other neo-liberalized countries. Neo-liberalized countries? If you want to see the future, look at Latvia, Estonia. Look at Greece. That’s the American plan. Essentially, an emigration of skilled labor, a sharp reduction of living standards, a 20 percent decline in population. And although it may appear to have more income, all of this income and GDP is, essentially, interest collection and rents to the FIRE sector.
All the American GDP growth is essentially payment to the bank, to the landlords and the monopolist, it’s not, the population, the employees are not sharing in the GDP. It’s all concentrated at the top. They make a desert, and they call it growth.
It hasn’t changed. Rome was a predatory economy held by military force that ultimately collapsed and America is on the same trajectory as Rome. And it knows this, I have spoken to American policymakers and they say, “you know, we we’re going to be dead by then. It doesn’t matter if the West loses. I’m going to get rich. I’m going to buy a farm in New Zealand and make a big bomb shelter there and live underground, you know, like a cave dweller.”
The financial time frame and the predatory rentier time frame is short term. The Eurasian time frame is long-term. So, you’ve got to have the short-term burning what wealth it has as opposed to the longer-term building up.
[Consider the Biden Covid relief measure.] They call it a stimulus bill, but if you’re starving, if you haven’t been able to pay your rent, if you’re six months behind in your rent and you get enough money to pay the landlord, at least one month back rent, that’s not a stimulus, that’s a survival. And it’s a one-time payment. This kind of stimulus checks that America’s sending out are sent out every month in Germany and parts of Europe.
“All the American GDP growth is essentially payment to the bank, to the landlords and the monopolist.”
The whole idea in Europe is: OK, you have a pandemic, you have business interrupted. What we’re going to do is we’re going to have a pause. You don’t pay the rent, but the landlords are not going to pay the banks. And the banks are not going to be in arrears. We’re just going to have a pause so that when it’s all over people will go back to normal. Well, China and Russia are already pretty much there and where you are [in Asia], and especially in Thailand, are already back to normal.
But in America anybody who’s renting or who’s bought a house on mortgage credit or who has credit card debt or personal debt or automobile debt they’re way behind. And all of these stimulus checks are just being used to pay the banks and the landlords not to not to buy more goods and services.
All they’re trying to do is, is get out of the hole that they’ve been dug into in the last 12 months. That’s not a stimulus that’s a partial, desperation payment. This problem never existed in other civilizations. You have the whole tradition of Greece, Babylonia that’s what my book Forgiving the Debt is all about. The whole idea is when there is an economic interruption, you have an interruption, you don’t have people into debt. You wipe out all of the arrears that have mounted up. You wipe out the tax arrears, the rent arrears, the debt of payment arrears. So once the crisis is over, you can start from a normal position again.
There’s no normalization in America, there’s no normal position to start. You’re starting from a position, even more behind the financial problems than you were when you went in. The foreign economies of China and Russia don’t have that kind of problem, they don’t have any kind of deficit. So, the West is beginning with 99 percent of the population deeper and deeper into debt to the 1 percent.
Where is that whole polarization between the 1 percent and the 99 percent? It doesn’t exist certainly in China and in Russia, Putin is trying to minimize it, given the legacy of the kleptocracy that the neo-liberals put in he’s still trying to deal with that, but you really have that. It’s a difference in economic systems and the direction in which these systems are moving in.
Pepe: I’m really glad that you brought up Ukraine, Michael, because this, let’s say U.S. foreign policy, even, before Trump and now with the new Biden-Harris administration, basically more or less what it boils down to is sanction sanctions, sanctions, as we know, and provocations, which is what they’re doing certainly in Syria with that recent bombing.
And, in the case of Ukraine and Donbass, it’s absolutely crazy because NATO so-called strategists, when you talk to them in Brussels, they know very, very well about each state or whatever they weaponize and financialize to profit Kiev to mount some sort of offensive against the Donbass and even if they would have like 300,000 soldiers against like 30,000 in Donbass.
If the Russians see that this is going to get really heavy if they intervene in directly, with their bombing, with their super missiles, they can finish this story in one day. And if they want it, they could finish the whole story, including invading Ukraine in three days, like they did in 2008 with Georgia and still they keep the provocations, loosely acted on by people from inside the Pentagon.
And so, we have sanctions, we have nonstop provocations, and we have also a sort of introducing a Fifth Column — elements inside or at the top of government — which brings me to, and I would love to have your personal analysis on the role of Mario (Goldman Sachs) Draghi now in Italy, which is something I had been discussing with my Italian friends. And there’s more or less a consensus, among very well informed, independent Italian analysts that Draghi may be the perfect Trojan horse to accelerate the destruction of the Italian state, which will accelerate the globalist project of the European Union, which is absolutely non-state centric.
Let’s put it this way, which is also part of the Great Reset so if you could briefly talk to us about the role of Super Mario at the moment.
Michael: Well, Italy is a very good example to look at. It had strings for a long time. When you have a country that needs infrastructure, that needs public, social democratic spending, you need a government to create the credit. But when Americans and specifically the University of Chicago free market lobbyists created the European, the Eurozone financial system, their premise was that governments cannot create money. Only banks can create money. Only banks owned by the bond holders can create money for the benefit of their owners and bond holders. So, no European government, first of all, can run a budget deficit sufficient to cope with the coronavirus or with the problems that have been plaguing Italy for a decade. They can’t create their money to revive employment, to revive infrastructure, to revive the economy. The European Central Bank only lends to other central banks.
It’s created trillions of euros just to buy stocks and bonds, not to spend into the economy, not to hire labor, not to build infrastructure, but just for the holders of the stocks and bonds. The 1 percent or 5 percent of the population gets richer. The function of the European Central Bank is to create money, to save the wealthiest 5 percent from losing a single penny on their stocks and bonds.
And the cost is to impoverish the economy and to basically make the economy end up looking like Greece, which was sort of the dress rehearsal for how the Eurozone was going to just essentially reduce Europe to debt dependency, just like in feudalism everybody had to have access to the land by becoming a serf.
Well now you’re in debt peonage. It’s the modern, finance capital’s version of serfdom. And so, in Italy we’re going to need government spending. We’re going to need to do in our way what China’s doing in its way and what Russia is doing in its way. We’re going to have some kind of government program. And we can’t have the economy being impoverished just because the University of Chicago has designed a plan for Europe to prevent the euro ever from being a rival to the U.S. dollar. If there’s no European central bank to borrow, to pump euros into the world economy, then, only dollars will be left for central bank reserves. The United States doesn’t ever want a rival. It wants satellites and so that’s what it’s basically turned Europe into. And I don’t see any response outside of Italy for an attempt to say we can’t be a part of this system. Let’s withdraw from the euro.
I know that the Greeks, when I was in Greece years ago, we all thought can’t we join with Italy and Portugal and Ireland and say look, the system isn’t working. Everybody else no, no, the Americans will just simply get us out of office one way or another. And in Italy, of course, if you look at what happened after World War II, the great threat was Italian communism. You had the Americans essentially say well, we know the answer to communism, it’s fascism and, you saw where they put the money. They essentially did every dirty trick in the book in order to fight any left- wing group in Italy, just as they did in Yugoslavia, just as they did in Greece, wiping out the partisans, all the leading anti-Nazi groups from Greece to Italy to elsewhere. All of a sudden they were all either assassinated or moved out of office and replaced by the very people that America had been fighting against during World War II.
Well, now Italy is finally coming to terms with this and trying to fight back and you’re having what’s happening there, between Northern Italy and Southern Italy. You’re having the same splits occur in other countries.
Pepe: Yeah. Well, I’m going to bring up, perhaps an even more extreme case now Michael, which is the case of Brazil, which at the moment is in the middle of an absolutely out of this world mix of telenovela and Kabuki theater that even for most Brazilians is absolutely incomprehensible. It’s like a fragmentation bomb exploding over and over again, a Groundhog Day of fragmentation bombs.
In fact, it’s completely crazy. Lula [former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva] is back in the picture as well. We still don’t know under which terms, we still don’t know how the guys who run the show, which are the Brazilian military, are going to deal with him or instrumentalize him, et cetera.
In 2007, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) and his wife Marisa Letícia review troops during the Independence Day military parade. (Ricardo Stuckert, Agência Brasil, CC BY 3.0. Wikimedia Commons)
I bring up this case because … essentially it has convulsed Brazil completely and large parts of Latin America. It is a telenovela with one cliffhanger after another, sometimes in a matter of minutes, but it encompasses all the basic themes of what really interests the 0.01 percent, which we can identify for instance as a class war against labor which is what the system in Brazil, since the coup against Dilma [Former President Dilma Vana Rousseff] has been waging. A war against mixed economies, economic sovereignty, which is something that the Masters of the Universe of the 0.01 percent cannot wage against Russia and China. But that was very successfully waged against Brazil and implemented in Brazil. In fact, in a matter of two years, they completely devastated the country in every possible sense, industrially, sociologically, you name it…
And of course, because the main objective is something that you keep stressing over and over again, unipolar rentier dominance, in fact.
Brazil, I would say is the extreme case in the world not only in the Global South, but in planetary terms of let’s say the last frontier of the rentier economy, when you manage to capture a country that was slowly emerging as a leader in the Global South, as an economic leader. Don’t forget that a few years ago, Brazil was the sixth-largest economy in the world and on the way to become the fifth. Now it’s the 12th and falling down nonstop and controlled by a mafia that includes not by accident, a Chicago Boy Pinochetista, Minister Paulo Guedes, who is implementing, in the 21st century, something that was implemented in Chile in the ‘70s and ‘80s. And they were successful. Apparently, at least so far.
Brazil is so disorganized as a nation, so shattered, so fragmented and atomized as a nation that basically it depends on the re-emergence of a single political leader, in this case, Lula to try to rebuild the nation from scratch. And even in a position where he cannot control the game he can interfere in the game, which is what happened, like you know, … when he gave a larger-than-life press conference, mixed with a re-presentation of himself as a statesman and said, “Look the whole thing is shattered, but there is some light at the end of the tunnel.”
But still he cannot confront the real Masters of the Universe that have allowed this to happen in the first place. So just to give an example to many of you who are not familiar with some details of the Brazilian case, and it involves directly the Obama-Biden scheme or the Obama-Biden larger operation. When Biden was vice president in 2013, in May 2013, he visited Brazil for three days and he met with President Dilma.
They discussed very touchy subjects, including the most important one, the absolutely enormous, pre-salt oil reserves, which obviously, the Americans wanted to be part of the whole thing, not by accident. You know what happened one week later? The start of the Brazilian color revolution, in fact, and this thing kept rolling and rolling and rolling.
We got the coup against Dilma in 2016, we got to the Car Wash operation landing Lula in jail. And we got to the election of [President Jair] Bolsanaro. And now we are in a place where even if the military controls this whole process, even if Bolsanaro is becoming bad for business will he become bad for the rentier class business, for the 0.01 percent in the U.S. that has all the connections in their new, large neo-colony in the tropics, which has enormous strategic value, not to mention, unforeseen resources, wealth resources, right? So, this is an extreme case and I know that you follow Brazil relatively closely. So, your geo-economic and geopolitical input on the running telenovela I think would be priceless for all of us.
Michael: Well, this problem goes back 60 years. In 1965, the former president of Brazil came to New York and we met. He explained to me how the United States essentially got rid of him because he wasn’t representing the banking class. And he said that they built Brasilia because it’s apart from the big industrial cities, they wanted to prevent industry and democracy and the population from controlling the government.
So, they built Brasilia. He said maybe they’ll use it as an atom bomb site. It certainly doesn’t have an economic thing. Well, fast forward, in 1980, after Mexico defaulted on its foreign debt in 1972, nobody would invest in Latin America. And by 1990, Brazil was paying 45 percent interest per year to borrow the dollars to be able to finance its deficit, which is mainly flight capital by the wealthy. Well, I think I’d mentioned before here, I was hired by Scudder, Stevens and Clark for the Third World bond fund. Forty five percent: I mean, just imagine that. That’s a fortune every year. No American would buy it, no European would buy it. Who bought it? The Brazilians and the Argentineans bought, and I get it, they’re the government, they’re the central bankers. They’re the president’s family. They’re the 1 percent, they’re the only people that are holding Brazil’s dollar debt.
So when Brazil pays its foreign dollar debt, it’s paying to its own 1 percent who are holding, who are saying well, we’re holding it off shore in the Dutch West Indies where the fund was located for tax-exempt purposes and pretending to be American imperialists, but actually being local imperialists.
Well then, just towards the end of Lula’s reign, the Council of Economic Advisors brought Jamie Galbraith and Randy Wray and me down for a discussion. How do we, you know, we’re, we’re really worried because, Lula in order to get elected, had to meet with the banks and agree to give them what they wanted.
They said, look, we can see that, you know, you have the power to be elected. We don’t want to have to fight you in dirty ways, but will let you be elected, but you’re going to have to do the policies and certainly the financial policies that we want and Lula made a kind of a devil’s agreement with them because he didn’t want to be killed and he wanted to do some good things.
So, he was sort of like a Bernie Sanders-type character. Okay, you have to go along with a really bad system in order to get something good done, because Brazil really needs something good done. Well, the fact is that even the little bit he did the finance couldn’t take because one of the characteristics of financial wealth is it’s addictive. It’s not like diminishing marginal utility. If you give more food to an employee or to a worker you know, at the end of the meal, you’re satiated, you don’t want much more. If you give enough money you know, OK, they buy a few luxuries and then, OK, they save it. But if you give more money to a billionaire they want even more and they grow even more desperate. It’s like a cocaine-addicted person and the Brazilian ruling class wanted it so desperately that they framed up and controlled the utterly corrupt judiciary. The judiciary in Brazil is almost as corrupt as it is in New York City.
Pepe: More, even more.
Michael: They framed them up and they want totalitarian control. And that sort of is what free market is.Totalitarian control by the financial class. That’s freedom for the financial class, if the freedom to do what they want to do to the rest of the economy, that’s libertarianism, it’s a free market, it’s Austrian economics.
It’s the right wing’s fight against government, it’s a fight against any governments for long enough who resist the financial and real estate interests. That’s what the free market is. And Brazil is merely the most devastating example of this because it takes such a racial term there. Not only does Brazil want to make a fortune, tearing down the Amazon, cutting up the Amazon, selling the lumber to China, turning the Amazon into soy production to sell to China. But for that, you have to exterminate the domestic population, the indigenous population that wants to use the land to feed itself. So you see the kind of race war and ethnic war that you have, not to mention the war against the blacks in the Brazilian slums that Lula tried so much to overcome.
So you have a resumption of the ethnic war there, and on Wall Street, I had discussions with money managers back in 1990. Well I wonder whether that’s going to be a model for what’s happening in the United States with the ethnic war here.
Essentially, it’s a tragedy what’s happening in Brazil, but it’s pretty much what happened in Chile under Pinochet which is why they have the Pinochetistas and the Chicago boys that you mentioned.
Pepe: Absolutely. Coming back to China, Michael, and the [recent] approval of the Five-Year Plan, which is not actually the five-year plan. It’s actually three five-year plans in one because they are already planning 2035, which is something absolutely unimaginable anywhere in the West. Right?
So, it’s a different strategy of productive investment, of expansion of social welfare and solidifying social welfare, technological improvements. I would say by 2025 China would be very close to the same infotech level of the U.S., which is part of “Made in China 2025,” which is fantastic. They stopped talking about it, but they are still implementing it, the technological drive in all those standard areas that they had codified a few years ago. And of course, this notion, which I found particularly fascinating because it is in one sense socialism with some Confucianist elements, but it’s also very Taoist: The dual development strategy, which is inversions and expansion of domestic investment and consumption and balancing all the time with projects across Eurasia, not only affiliated with the Belt and Road, with the New Silk Road, but all other projects as well. So, when you have a leadership that is capable of planning with this scope, amplitude breadth and reach, and when we compare it to the money managers in the West, which basically their planning goes, not even quarterly in many cases, it’s 24 hours.
So our dichotomy between rentier capitalism, financialization, or whatever we want to define it, and state planning with the view of social benefit is even starker in fact, and I’m not saying that the Chinese system can be exported to the rest of the world, but I’m sure that, all across the Global South, when people look at Chinese policies, long-term, how they are planning, how they are developed and how they are always fine tuning what they developed and discuss…. As you said in the beginning, this is a frontal shock of two systems and sooner or later we’re going to have the bulk of the Global South including nations which nowadays are still American vassals or satrapies or puppets or poodles, et cetera.
They’re going to see which way the wind is blowing. Right?
Michael: Why can’t the Chinese system be exported to the West? That’s a good question…. How would you make American industry able to follow the same productive path that China did? Well for one thing the biggest element in workers’ budget today is housing, 40 percent. There was one way to get rid of it, get rid of the high housing prices that essentially, or whatever a bank would lend. And the banks lend essentially the economic rent. There’s a very simple way to keep housing prices down. You tax the land rent, you use your tax system, not on taxing labor, that increases the cost of labor, not increasing capital, that leaves less, industrial capital, but your tax of the land and the real estate and the banks.
Well, suppose you were to lower the price of housing in America from 40 percent to 10 percent like China has, and this is the big element in the cost structure difference. Well, if all of a sudden people only had to pay 10 percent of their income for housing, then all the banks would go under because 80 percent of the bank loans are mortgage loans.
The whole idea is that the purpose of housing is to force how many buyers and renters go into debt to the banks so that the banks end up with all of the lend rent that the landlord class used to get. This is what’s preventing America from being like China. What if America would try to develop a high-speed railroad like China?
Well, then you need the right of way. You’d need to have the railroads go in a straight line. … They need a right of way and it doesn’t have a right of way because that conflicts with private property and most of the right of way is a very expensive real estate.
So, you can’t have high-speed rail in the United States, like in China. Suppose you would have a low-cost education. Well then, you get rid of the whole means of siphoning off labor’s income to pay for education loans. You could go, suppose you had private healthcare and prevent Americans from getting sick like they do in China and Thailand, where you are.
One of China’s many super-speed electric trains. They are generations ahead of America’s rail system. (Wikicommons)
Well, then the health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t be able to make their rent. So you could not have America adopt a China type industrial program without what would be really a revolution against the legacy of the monopoly of private banking, of finance and all of the fortunes that have been built up financially really in the last 40 years since 1980.
Pepe: So, what’s going to happen in the, let’s say, short to mid-term in the U.S.? Michael, we are seeing the corrosion of the whole system, not only externally in terms of foreign policy and the end of the free lunch, but internally with those 70-million-plus “deplorables” being literally canceled from public debate, the impoverishment of the middle classes, with over 50 million people in America who are practically becoming literally poor. And obviously the American dream ended a few decades ago, maybe, but now there’s not even a glimpse of it, that there could be a renewal of the American dream. So we have a larval civil war situation, degrading on a daily basis. What’s the end game in fact? And what exactly does Wall Street, the American ruling class —the guys who have those lunches at the Harvard club — what do they ultimately want?
Michael: Well, what you call a disaster for the economy, isn’t it a bonanza for the 1 percent? This is a victory of finance. You look at it as a collapse of industrial capitalism. I look at it as the victory of rentier finance capitalism. You’re having probably 10 million Americans that are going to be thrown out of their apartments and their homes in June when the moratorium on rents and mortgages ends. You’re going to have a vast increase in the homeless population. That will probably represent an increase in people who use the subways. Where else are they going to live? And all of this, there’s an immense amount of private capital firms that have all been created in the last year of just wealth accumulations and they’re saying there are going to be such great opportunities to pick up real estate at bargain prices, all of this for the commercial real estate, that’s broken, all the buildings and the restaurants that have to be sold because they can’t meet their mortgage payments and their rents, all the houses that are going to be under, private capital can come in and do what was done after the Obama evictions.
We can do what Blackstone did. We can buy them all out for pennies on the dollar. So, for them, they’re looking at their own 20-year plan. And their 20-year plan is to grab everything!
…
A Long read, eh?
Yeah. I know it was a long read. Maybe you all should have gotten a beer and some pizza before you started to read it, maybe.
Delicious Beer and pizza.
.
Keep in mind that any disruption will be uneven. It will be in patches. Avoid the high-risk areas if you can, and be part of a group.
A Comment that generated this post…
The question;
Your website is by far THE MOST IMPORTANT resource for westerners right now. I have a lot to learn from site, and I also have some questions. The most important question I have at this moment is –
1) How do you advise Americans/Europeans who understand what is happening, the future that is approaching to prepare, survive AND maintain their sanity in these trying times. Especially those who can’t move outside USA/EU?
Your help and answer will be much appreciated. The feeling of doom and dread while your compatriots run towards jumping off a cliff (and forcibly drag you along) is not a fun feeling.
Note: I am in EU but I am using a VPN for my safety. My IP address will indicate an Asian country close to China but I am living in EU. Please approve my comment, it’s not a spam.
The Answer:
Thank you for this. This question has been asked of me my many people, and I have answered it. Long time MM readers can answer this for you, but I will take a quick stab at it yet again.
Essentially, the social system that humans established way back around 5000 years ago is faulted. The moment that banking interest obtained the same value as gold or physical exertion, the system was doomed. It just took 7000 years to manifest.
Now the USA is in debt for nearly 30 trillion dollars. All the gold on the planet earth wouldn’t be able to pay this debt. Yet this debt is jut an artificial creation. It’s just money out of thin air. Value from nothing.
For the last 75 years, the United States used this artificial value to control the world. The wealthy became like Gods. The poor became like slaves.
And as a result the world became a very difficult place to live. Are you enjoying life right now? If not, why?
Everything can be traced down to people who make nothing, who produce nothing, becoming Gods over those that do. And these “Gods” have their own group of toadies who service them. Creating wars, strife, and elements of control. It’s all ungainly and unraveling.
China, Russia and Iran are unifying.
They are not allowing this artificial wealth creation mechanism to become the monster that it is in the West, and this is a major threat to the “American way of life”, “democracy” and what little is left of “freedom”.
The world is resetting.
Now, America and the West (the five eyes) is like a big old enraged old elephant on a jet aircraft. It is thrashing about, banging into the side of the aircraft and is roaring and howling and tearing up the floor. The pilot and his crew are deciding whether or not it is in the best interests to just open up the rear cargo door and throw him out the plane with no parachute. This is where we are today.
You have no control on whether or not the elephant will get ejected. For you are just a tiny, tiny flea on the back of this enraged elephant. Your choices are quite limited, but they are clear. Do you [1] jump off now and land on the sterile clean floor of the aircraft, while the elephant stomps about, [2] ride the elephant as you have been and hope that the elephant calms down and the plane lands safely, [3] fight with the other fleas on the back of the elephant and try to build a little nest of elephant hair, and float gently to the side of the plane intact.
And who is this elephant? Why it is the United States; an Oligarchy-ruled Military-Empire.
I have advised everyone who could, to take option [1] and flee.
Those that could not, like yourself, I suggest option [3]. What ever you do, do not take option [2]. That is the herd option and it will be lethal.
And I will repeat my advice. Here is the advice for option [3]...
[1] Do not be a “lone wolf”. That is going to get you killed. Be part of a local community. Know who you can trust and who you cannot. Identify friends and foes. Again, I will repeat, do not try to be alone. You need to be part of a community to survive. This is your MOST IMPORTANT task.
[2] Learn a skill. Take an online class in paramedic technology, know some basic repair skills. You need to be useful when things go really crazy. have a skill. Have abilities. be able to work as a "team player". Be reasonable, balanced, and provide something of worth.
[3] Stock up on food supplies. Make sure that you have an enormous larder of dry goods.
[4] Guns and weapons. Having a firearm is beneficial only if you know how to use it well. Otherwise, count on the avoidance strategy of survival, but be absolutely ready to kill with your bare hands if necessary. If you are not at this point, then you need to get to that point. Its basic survival 101.
[5] Basics of location. If you are going to "hunker down", then be ready. Make sure that you have a hidden room in your basement or a place to go where you can hide if need be. Know where to get water, potable water easily, if you need to. Know how to recharge a batter with solar power or a generator from a bicycle.
[6] Do not trust the “news”. The "news" do not report anything, they actually provide deceptive reporting.
[5] Lie low, be low key. Do not get on any public or private arguments. Be as neutral as possible. Do not be a target. Use the avoidance strategy at every point.
[6] Do not have “burned bridges”. Go ahead “mend your fences”. Your future depends on your ability to work as a team.
[7] Barter goods. When times are rough, and money is worthless, humans resort to bartering. Women will provide sexual favors. Men can provide items, or services. Top rated items are small bottles of cheap whiskey, vodka, or spirits. Also good are tobacco, cigarettes and pipe tobacco. A box of 100 disposable lighters is very cheap and you would be surprised how valuable they can become. Be able to reload ammo even if you don't have a gun. Antibiotics will be worth YOUR weight in gold. Whether for animals, or humans or next best herbal alternatives, having a supply is important. Same goes with condoms. You do not want to have a nasty STD when you are in a SHTF situation.
[8] Avoid crowds. Stay out of the cities. Do not isolate in the country.
[9] Do not trust anyone. We are all entering a time where betrayal and lies have become normal. Don't believe anyone. Don't trust anyone.
In America today is a world of hurt because everyone demands their “freedom” and “independence”. Contrast that to here in China where people work together to the greater good of everyone. Sure there might be a star basketball player, but he is shit when he comes across a well trained and organized team.
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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
You know, the Western “news” is just propaganda. Nothing more. It is used to instill fear, control and manipulate huge masses of people, and to bludgeon them into predefined and specific types of behaviors. And of the many things that propaganda does (lie, distort, and emphasize incorrect narratives) is ignore real and substantive actual news. And yeah. They do this for a reason, don’t you know. And this article is going to talk about one thing that the American media is very quiet about; the Chinese people are much more prosperous than Americans are.
So forget that neocon belief that the Chinese people are shivering in fear and oppression from their all-power Chinese Communist overlords (it is the de facto narrative). They aren’t. They are overwhelmingly happy, approve of their government, and just living their life in near carefree abandon.
Which is why I enjoyed traveling outside of America. When I went to Australia, the relationships with the folk there reminded me of my boyhood days in the 1960’s and 1970’s. And when I went to South East Asia, it reminded me of the days of “keg parties” and “hanging out”… you know. Doing ‘nothin. It was glorious.
It was everything I hoped it would be.
In those lands I wasn’t barraged with “news”. Even being connected to the USA though Wifi (much faster than what you get in the States, and for FREE!) no one read the “news” like I would (do so). They just pretty much ignored it. It was a much smaller part of their life. Certainly much smaller than what we from the States would think. And as a result they were far happier because of it.
Imagine that!
The lack of regulations, rules, policing control, laws, and just about everything else that is part and parcel of the regulatory and all-controlling America is absent in Asia. And it’s just glorious.
But anyways…
The American (and Western) “news” is just a big mill and den of lies and distortions. It is at all levels, and if you haven’t figured this out by now, you are either stupid or have mental problems. They lie. they distort. They cause you to live in fear. They spew hate. They are just awful.
The dangers of 3G; your brain will cook when you answer your cell phone.
Oh, and 5G, that terrible Chinese radiation is much worse!
Mad cow disease will kill you when you eat a hamburger.
Y2K is going to have your toaster jump and strangle you in the kitchen.
Killer zombie hornets is going to attack your community.
Donate money now to SAVE THE CHILDREN in far away Africa.
Dangerous child abductors are prowling all over your neighborhood.
Ask your doctor about Prozac Plus, the new gateway to happiness!
You too can get a free trial of unlimited internet only $9.99, special conditions apply don’t you know…
Do something. Now! Now! Nowwww!
Number 6: Unlike me, many of you have accepted the situation of your imprisonment, and will die here like rotten cabbages.
Do you think I’m exaggerating? I’m NOT. It’s just that when you view the “news” narrative out of context, at a time when the media onslaught has subsided, it seems just so very silly.
Silly.
Like mixing wine and chocolate.
Um. I take that back. Make that’s a good pairing. I’ll have to give it a try. Anyone game to experiment with me?
Anyways back to the silliness about the United States. It is, really is, silly.
Sorry for being so darn harsh, but it’s true. American “news” is just plain silly. Like check out the latest “shit-storm” that’s a-brewing on Drudge today…
Anyways, lets leave the fairy tale world of American (and UK, Australian and Indian) “news”…
…and discuss something that really is intentionally omitted.
Number Two: I'm the boss.
Number 6: No. One is the boss.
It is the idea that not only is the rest of the world growing, and prospering, but that China is leading the pack and doing much, much… so much better than anything their American cousins can even realize.
What?
That’s right.
And that’s what happens when you have a capable, experienced leadership that is motivated to improve the lives of it’s people.
Observer: Questions are a burden to others. Answers are prison for oneself.
The Communist Chinese are wealthier than Americans.
Ouch!
How about that for rubbing your face in a pile of shit?
This article is from Yicai global. You won't find it in the States, unless you perform a serious search. It's not that it's blocked, but perhaps it's more likely "shadow blocked". It's not gonna find it's way into your daily news feeds. Reprinted as found with editing to fit this venue. All credit to the author Ben Armour.
There has been a lot of chatter in the [Chinese] press about the Chinese government’s setting a growth target for 2021. And specifically whether or not it was able to achieve its longstanding goal of doubling incomes in the last ten years.
While this year’s economic prospects are clouded by uncertainty, a recent study by researchers at the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) indicates that China has already achieved its objective of building a moderately prosperous society (小康社会) – at least in its cities.
The study, published in the latest issue of China Finance, highlights the results of a comprehensive survey of urban families’ finances conducted at the end of 2019. It reports that median household net worth stood at CNY1.41 million or close to USD200,000.
Median household worth in China is $ 200,000 USD.
The US’s own Survey of Consumer Finances was last conducted by the Federal Reserve in 2016. If I adjust its findings for inflation, then median US household net worth was about USD104,000 in 2019.
Median household worth in the USA is $ 104,000 USD.
Thus, one can say that the typical US household is only about half as rich as the typical Chinese urban family.
Number 6: [referring to the chess game] Why do you use people?
Chessmaster: Some psychiatrists say it satisfies the desire for power. 'the only opportunity one gets here.
Number 6: That depends what side you're on.
Chessmaster: [quickly] I'm on my side.
Number 6: [quickly] Aren't we all.
Chessmaster: You must be new here. In time, most of us join the enemy - against ourselves.
How is this possible?
Since per capita GDP in the US is close to five times higher than in China, how can we explain such a surprising result?
The very unequal distribution of wealth in the US is a big part of the story.
The super wealthy is skewing all the numbers to be much higher than they would be otherwise.
The graph below shows that while median US household wealth is about half that of Chinese urban families, average US household net worth is about 80 percent higher than China’s USD413,000.
.
The ratio of average to median net worth is a measure of how equally wealth is distributed.
.
If everyone’s wealth was exactly the same, the ratio of the two net worth measures would be 1.0. China’s mean household net worth is double its median. The ratio in the US is seven times, pointing to a much more unequal distribution of wealth.
The Ideal = 1
China = 2
United States = 7
China has far better financial, and social equality than America has.
What are the attributes that contribute to this situation? Reason one.
Median Income. Since it lies right in the middle of the wealth distribution, we can think of the median household as “typical. ”Half the families are richer and half the families are poorer than it is.
On average, American families are wealthier than Chinese ones. There are a lot of really wealthy American families that pull that average up.
But the typical American household remains poorer than its Chinese urban counterpart.
Note that I am making these comparisons in 2019 US dollars and am not accounting for the fact that a US dollar buys more in China than it does in the US.
Reason Two
A second reason that Chinese urban households are relatively wealthy is that home ownership is quite widespread.
According to the PBOC study, 96 percent of urban households own residential property. The corresponding figure for the US is only 64 percent.
Median Data
96% of Chinese own their own homes.
64% of Americans own their own homes.
The gap between US and Chinese in home ownership is even more striking at the low end of the income distribution. In the US, only one-third of the families in the lowest income quintile own a home. In China, 89 percent do.
Low Income Data
89% of China’s poor own homes.
33% of American poor own homes.
In fact, many Chinese families own more than one property: 31 percent of them have two and 11 percent have three or more. On average, each urban family owns 1.5 residential properties.
Chinese home ownership
Average family owns 1.5 homes.
31% of Chinese own 2 homes.
11% of Chinese own three or more homes.
Chinese family wealth does not simply rest on inflated real estate values.
Residential property represents just under 60 percent of household assets, with financial assets and other real assets (shops, productive equipment, vehicles, etc.) each accounting for close to 20 percent.
Moreover, from the information in the study, I estimate that the price-to-income ratio of these households’ residential property holdings at 3.7. This is fairly close to the median house price-to-income ratio in the US, 3.6, according to Demographia’s most recent survey.
Home price / Income for China = 3.7
Home price / income for the USA = 3.6
Reason Three
The third reason for Chinese urban households’ high net worth is their relatively low indebtedness.
Seventy-seven percent of US households have assumed some sort of financial liability (a mortgage, a car loan, student debt, etc.). In China, only 57 percent of the urban households have incurred such liabilities.
In debt to financial loans – USA = 77%
In debt to financial loans – China = 57%
Not only do fewer Chinese households carry liabilities, but what debts they owe are small relative to their assets. The debts of the median Chinese household, which does have liabilities, only amounts to 16 percent of its assets. In contrast, the median indebted American household has a leverage ratio of 36 percent of its assets.
American debt to assets = 36%
Chinese debt to assets = 16%
Reason Four
The final piece of the puzzle is understanding how Chinese urban households can have such a high rate of home ownership and such a low rate of indebtedness.
Chinese households do have much higher savings rates than their US counterparts and that is an important factor. But more important was the way in which the housing stock was privatized.
Up until the late 1990s, almost all residential property belonged to state-owned institutions, which provided low-rent accommodation to their employees. As part of the state-owned enterprise reform program, the government relieved firms of the burden of providing housing for their workers. Urban households were able to purchase their apartments from their employers at reasonable prices, leading to today’s high rate of home ownership and supporting urban prosperity.
A China First
(Yicai Global) April 27 — China may be the first country in the world to have reached a 96 percent urban home ownership rate, according to the central bank.
China has a 96% home ownership rate in the cities.
In an article the People’s Bank of China published in its China Finance journal today it also noted that the bulk of assets held by urban families is physical.
Chinese assets tend to be tangible, physical “brick and mortar” items.
American assets tend to be intangible, stocks, bonds, pensions, potential worth.
Home ownership in developed countries is mostly around the 60 percent level, according to data from Trading Economics. In the US, the figure was 65.1 percent at the end of last year, US Department of Commerce statistics show. The PBOC report puts China’s home ownership 28.5 percentage points ahead of the US.
Chinese home ownership = 96% (urban)
USA home ownership = 65.1%
Typical (developed country) home ownership = 60%
The reports also said Chinese urban households prefer risk-free financial assets, with homes making up nearly 70 percent and financial assets 20.4 percent.
The average wealth of urban households is CNY3.18 million (USD449,200), with a median value of CNY1.63 million, per the report. The difference between the two is about CNY1.55 million, indicating an uneven distribution of household assets.
Beijing, Shanghai and Jiangsu province ranked as the top three for family riches, with CNY8.9 million, CNY8.1 million and CNY5.1 million, respectively. The lowest three provincial-level units are the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and Gansu province in northwestern China and Jilin province in the northeast.
Households in urban areas generally take out loans. Some 56.5 percent of those surveyed are in debt. Among them, the total owed per household is CNY512,000 (USD72,346), with roughly 54 percent owing less than CNY300,000, 35.6 percent owing CNY300,000 to CNY1 million, while the remaining 10.5 percent owe over CNY1 million.
Mortgages constitute the bulk of household debt.
Some 77 percent of indebted households have home loans averaging CNY389,000, making up over three quarters of total household debt. The PBOC’s urban resident household assets and liabilities research team from its Statistics and Analysis Department canvassed more than 30,000 households in 30 provinces, autonomous regions and cities across the country in mid-to-late October.
Wow.
It’s time to celebrate!
.
Um. No, this isn’t right. Not enough food.
A real celebration requires FOOD!
.
Ah. Much better.
Pretty Amazing Stuff
Yes it is.
So what is not being reported in the American and Western press? It is that China is not some backwards, dirty, disease ridden infested dark smoggy slime-ball nation. But rather, a growing prosperous nation where most people own their homes. Where most people are debt free, and those that are in debt with loans are not too worried about it as the debts are small relative to their income stream. It’s a big, big change when you compare that to America.
How can Americans (and others in “the West”) have this kind of idea? Well consider what consists of “news”.
...The dramatic detention of a handful of foreigners in recent years has instilled a deep fear in some people, especially those with politically adjacent occupations. As President Xi breeds a culture of nationalism and forges increasingly hostile relations with Western governments, some fear that if a diplomatic spat between their government and Beijing occurred while they were in China they could become a target...
Um…
So just in this paragraph we see…
Dramatic detention of foreigners!
Deep fear is present.
President Xi breeds a culture of nationalism!
President Xi is hostile to nations in the West.
And that is just ONE lone paragraph.
Do I have to point out the absolute falsehoods, the manipulations, the distortions and the lies in the four bullet points above, or are you aware of the reality?
It’s a non-stop bullshit garbage narrative like this that is pumped relentlessly into the brains of Americans, non-stop, 24-7.
I makes me want to have a fine libation, and some delicious food, I’ll tell you what.
[over the opening of each episode - Number 2 played by various actors] Number 6: Where am I?
Number 2: In the Village.
Number 6: What do you want?
Number 2: Information.
Number 6: Whose side are you on?
Number 2: That would be telling. We want information... information... information.
Number 6: You won't get it.
Number 2: By hook or by crook, we will.
Number 6: Who are you?
Number 2: The new Number 2.
Number 6: Who is Number 1?
Number 2: You are Number 6.
Number 6: I am not a number, I am a free man.
Let’s take a look at what China is today, shall we. Here’s some videos (in no particular order) that I just pulled off my Douxing feed this morning. Just you click on the picture and it will open up in a new tab.
High Speed Trains.
There are everywhere in China. Fast. Cheap. Comfortable. Convenient. Takes you anywhere and everywhere. The American news is again talking about how soon, one day, America too will be as good as China. And the talk is all about having high speed trains, like China has.
Of course they never mention that America is literally twenty years behind China in this regard, or that America has already spent 77 billion dollars for a cardboard and fiberglass mock-up. Or that America started on the American HST at the same time that China did, but with over ten times the funding level. And while China today has hundreds of lines, thousands of Kilometers of track, hundreds of trains, and stations, the United States has nothing.
But some day soon. You just wait and see. Right?
In China, HST is average, normal, and no big deal.
Just click on the picture and the video will pop up in another tab.
Guangzhou
Guangzhou is a “working class” city. Much like Pittsburgh, PA is. It’s big. really big. But it’s got a real “local” feel to it. It’s not cosmopolitan like Beijing, or Shanghai are. It’s just full of average people. Going to work and living life.
Here’s some gals going out for a nice dinner, some great friendship and some wine. Wouldn’t you all wish that you were there with them? I do. I’ll tell you what.
Some young gals having a nice dinner in Guangzhou China.
Chinese Transport Air Force
The Chinese, since there have been so many restrictions placed on them by America, and the UK, were forced to develop their own systems. This is everything from their own space stations, and Mars lander to military aircraft, and computer systems. All “home grown” and mass produced at a frenzy and pace that is stunning to behold.
We hear about it all, but then when you see just how many state of the art systems are in use, it just boggles the mind.
A Typical Chinese family
Here we have a typical Chinese family in their home. Not some kind of dirt floored hovel, is it? Do they look like they are starving, and begging for American “democracy” to “save them”?
Why so many children? I thought that the Chinese kill babies and that you are only allowed to have one </sarcasm>. But take a look at the mother and her 19 year old daughter. The Chinese don’t age like Americans do, because they EAT MUCH HEALTHIER. No GMO hormones, and no one is taking anti-stress, and anti-depression medications.
Outside of Zhuhai
This chick is a dancing and carrying on in a park right outside the supermarket where I shop for my groceries. Yeah. It’s pretty much like this. This is obviously on the weekend, judging from all the people. Must be on a Sunday.
A typical park
The Chinese have made improving the lives of their citizens a top priority. This is ALL that the government does. I would say that a full 100% of their effort is towards helping the people, improving their quality of life, and setting up defensive measures so that evil people cannot run “color revolutions” against them.
Most parks are now, beautiful, well maintained, and tranquil. Like this.
Movie making
One of the big omissions in American “news” is that just about everything is made in China. But if you listen to them, you get the idea that China only makes cheap pens, rubber duckies and the low-end products for Wal-mart. It doesn’t. All of the high-tech stuff is designed and made in China. All of it.
All of it.
Like this movie camera kit that is used to make the movies that Americans are not permitted to watch. LOL.
All this is about reality
If the masses of people could think critically for themselves, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. By the way Rod, there is a war. It’s raging and has enveloped this planet. It’s a war for our minds. Many have been captured. I know, I see them every day. And I read what they write.
-Ohio Guy
I think that most of us are living in an artificial construct; and artificial reality. it is one that is constructed and based upon lies and untruths. And so, believing these lies and untruths we live our lives, making decisions, and behaving in certain ways that do not… and should not.. be part of our reality.
I suppose that you could point this out to anyone. You could point at them and say..
"How dare you live like you do? Your ideas and your thoughts do not match mine. You must change and agree with me! For my reality, and my understanding is the only and correct way of thinking."
So, yeah. Let’s keep a real sense of perspective here.
It doesn’t matter what other people are doing. Not really. Not if they are Americans, or Chinese, or Zambians. All that matters is what you are doing with your life.
If you are happy, having fun, trust your government, then that is fine. You can keep on believing what you want to believe. You can keep on doing what you are doing, and listening to the news as you see it. It’s working for you. Keep it up.
But if you are not, then maybe you should reevaluate your life; your reality. You need to ask whether it is an actual reflection of the truth. Or instead, are you living something else instead.
Are you like “Number 6” in the 1968 television show “The Prisoner” where you live in a nice pleasant place, but you can never leave it. And no matter what you do, you never get any straight answers and never know your true and real situation?
"The Prisoner" is a unique piece of television. It addresses issues such as personal identity and freedom, democracy, education, scientific progress, art and technology, while still remaining an entertaining drama series. Over seventeen episodes we witness a war of attrition between the faceless forces behind 'The Village' (a Kafkaesque community somewhere between Butlins and Alcatraz) and its most strong willed inmate, No. 6. who struggles ceaselessly to assert his individuality while plotting to escape from his captors.
I think that for many Americans, the answer is YES.
It’s all a big farce. Elections are held, but no one really has any power. The reality looks nice and pleasant, but there is this grinding negativity just under the surface, and no one ever gets to glimpse their real reality.
.
Since its initial telecast, back in 1967, this enigmatic classic has evoked every reaction from awe to contempt. Given the amount of serious critical attention THE PRISONER has received, and given that a whole society has been created in its honor, I'd say the awe has won out, and I vehemently agree that THE PRISONER deserves to be honored as one of the truly artistic programs created for commercial television.
However, I can also understand the frustration many viewers have felt. Over the course of its seventeen episodes, this offbeat spy thriller becomes further and further offbeat until it ultimately transforms into surrealistic allegory. I confess I'm not sure whether this transformation was intended as a complete surprise, or whether you were supposed to know where the show was going, but in either case, I think you can better appreciate the series if you can see the earlier episodes as preparation for what's to come.
THE PRISONER's title character is a British secret agent (series creator Patrick McGoohan) who may or may not be SECRET AGENT's John Drake. The story begins with him suddenly and mysteriously resigning, then just as suddenly and mysteriously being rendered unconscious and transported to a place known only as The Village, the location of which is known only to those who run it. The Village is a prison camp, but with all of the amenities of a vacation resort,. Attractive dwellings, shops, restaurants, etc. exist side by side with high-tech methods of keeping order and extracting information from those who won't give it up willingly.
Those who try to escape get to meet Rover, a belligerent weather balloon capable of locomotion, and seemingly of independent thought. It appears (to me anyway) that the authorities can summon Rover, send it away, and give it instructions, but that it acts more or less on its own initiative. Rover deals with fugitives by plastering itself against their faces, rendering them either unconscious or dead, depending on how bad a mood it's in. Twice, we see it haul someone in from the ocean by sucking them up into a whirlpool it creates.
Citizens of The Village, including those in authority, are identified only by numbers. Our protagonist is known only as No. 6 throughout the entire series. The Village is run by No. 2, who in turn reports to an unseen and unidentified No. 1. No. 1 is apparently an unforgiving boss, because No. 2 is always being replaced.
Shortly after he arrives in in the Village, No. 6 is informed, by the reigning No. 2, that he should count on remaining there permanently. If he cooperates, life will be pleasant and he may even be given a position of authority. If he resists -- well, the only restriction they're under is not to damage him permanently. To satisfy his captors, No. 6 need only answer one question: `Why did you resign?' His question in turn is, `Who runs this place? Who is No. 1?'
Most of the episodes deal with No. 6's attempts to escape, and/or his captors' attempts to break him, although there are a few side trips. Several episodes suggest that No. 6's own people may be involved with running The Village. Some of the episodes are fairly straightforward, while others leave you with questions as to exactly what went on. It's important to note that several of the more obscure episodes -- for example, `Free for All' and `Dance of the Dead' -- are among the seven episodes that McGoohan considers essential to the series.
And then we come to the final episode, `Fall Out,' which promises to answer all the burning questions the viewers have been anguishing over for seventeen weeks -- and which so frustrated and angered those viewers back in 1967 that McGoohan had to go into hiding for awhile. Of course, I can't reveal any of the really important details, because, as No. 2 says in the recap that begins most of the episodes, `That would be telling,' and as all of us IMBD contributors know, `telling,' is frowned upon. However, to come back to the point with which I started, you should be prepared for a resolution of an entirely different nature than the one you'll probably be expecting -- a resolution that forces you to rethink your entire concept of the Village, and of the intention of the series. If you aren't ready, you'll be frustrated. If you are, you can accept THE PRISONER is the spirit in which it was offered.
Yes. The 1968 version of the televisions show “The Prisoner” says it most clearly.
When I saw the first episode of this series, my jaw dropped in amazement. Here was a TV series that was entertaining and actually made you think. Nothing was ever what it appeared, no one had a real name, you never knew who was the good guy or the bad guy (or if they were one in the same!). The "final" episode was what could only be described as PSYCHEDELIC.
This TV series was, and still is, way ahead of its time.
Perhaps America today is a big prison. The inmates don’t realize that they are trapped in one, as it appears to be open and free. But in functional reality it is just one big enormous prison.
The New Number Two: Good day, Number Six.
Number 6: Number what?
The New Number Two: Six. For official purposes, everyone has a number. Yours is number six.
Number 6: I am not a number. I am a person.
The New Number Two: Six of one, half a dozen of another.
Do you want more?
I have more posts in my China and America Comparisons Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
This post is about people. It’s about families. It’s about relationships. It’s about cultures, societies, and life. It’s about lifestyle. And I want to start the year with a good humane post that discusses these elements in our life.
Unlike previous years, there seems to be an increase in videos and movies about humanity. Sure there’s the action videos, and lots and lots of guns. There’s monsters and super heroes, but a new kind of video is emerging from the old. It’s a video about people and their humanity. And these videos are becoming more an more common.
This article, this post, highlights those videos.
Please kick on the picture to see the video. It will open up in another tab. Allow some time for it to load. Most videos are in the 20MB range, but one is 65MB. I do hope that you all will enjoy them as much as I have.
A Chinese video about a father and his daughter..
The night before my father died, he left me an email message. It was a stupid one-sentence email along the likes of “do you have the link for the website we talked about?” And I kept that message. It’s still there, sitting in a dusty file folder on my long disused Yahoo! account. And account I only refresh every year or so to keep my old archives and records intact.
The following is a video. It’s a Chinese video. It’s about a man, now an old man. He’s a man, a father, who likes to listen to the voice-mail message left by his (now dead) daughter. We don’t know how she died, or what their personal situation is. But we do know that they had a relationship, and hearing her voice was very important to him. So important that he has paid for her cell-phone account to stay active for years and years.
But then suddenly, her voice-message disappears. And a story ensues…
.
I hope that you all enjoyed this video as much as I have. You don’t need to understand Chinese. Just watch what is going on.
So what might the oligarchs think of Chinese people with their resounding support for the Communist Party of China?
They will hate them with every bone in their body, they will be furious that this country resists and denies them a chance to plunder it - yet again.
The oligarchic death cult will be extremely angry that a single country presents an excellent and achievable system of government and financial management and community betterment to all the other nations on earth.
-Posted by: uncle tungsten | Jan 5 2021 20:48 utc | 14
Two strangers in Europe
This next video is about two strangers. It’s a European video. And they get stuck in an elevator. You know those places where you just stand and focus on the lighted numbers, the buttons or the advertisements on the walls. never communicating with the other people that you share that brief moment of time with.
Enjoy, it’s actually a little cute.
.
That was good. Right? A nice fun and kind of cute video. But the message is important.
How are you going to behave this month?
A sense of community.
In the next video we have a typical small family run business. These places are everywhere in China. You can get a breakfast for under $1. Usually some hot Jiu (which is a rice porridge soup), some Baozi (which is a small roll with meat or vegetables inside), some noodles, and some sweet bean drink. The business is thriving…
…but there is an emergency and the entire family must leave now. And all the people are stuck with no one to serve them, and the family devoid of income for the say. What is going to happen? As these establishments typically don’t have doors, are out in the open, with the family living in the back room watching the store.
What is going to happen?
It’s all about community.
.
It’s all about community and our role in it.
Lets look at what China plans to do over the next 5 years. The article provides a very broad explanation then links to some specifics at the bottom, the item about the Yangtze River Economic Belt being most important. I found this bit of reporting highly important:
"More specifically, these days the government uses the five-year plans to reinforce and complement the market dynamic by providing regulation and guidance. That includes providing the legal and social framework, such as issuing monetary and fiscal policies, providing public goods and services, such as building high-speed rails, and correcting for market failures like pollution."
There's a vast difference in focus between China and the West--China's sharply focused on its development in ways the West isn't whatsoever, and it makes certain its citizenry knows that and everyone's working as a team--every job has its own value and is important.
The best explanation I have is that China is doing while the West is watching and not doing; therefore, China continues to grow ahead of those standing watching with their jaws agape.
China outnumbers the Outlaw US Empire by more than one billion people. That's a huge team working together to advance their nation and themselves.
Within the US Empire, at least 30% of the labor force is idle and not even counted for unemployment purposes since they aren't actively looking for non-existent jobs while about 24% of the active labor force is unemployed. That's 54% of your human capital that's not being used at all to better themselves and their nation. Honestly, which one has the better outlook?
- Posted by: karlof1 | Jan 5 2021 22:57 utc | 28
Bravery, sacrifice and respect
The next movie consists of excerpts from a Chinese war drama.
Most Americans haven’t a clue to the fact that China has been embroiled in centuries of very, very bloody warfare. People have suffered well enough, and one of the great polices of modern Communist China is to avoid war and get off that “bandwagon” of exporting “communism”, or “democracy” to the rest of the world.
Instead, China has adopted a “live and let live” attitude, and all of China, from the laws, to the media play this narrative over and over.
Never the less, if you need to fight, you fight to the best of your ability. And you do your best. You fight for family, and your die for family. For in China your community is who you are.
Which is the opposite of what it is in America.
In America, it is “every man for himself“, it’s a “dog eat dog” world and you need to “carve out a life for yourself“, or you are a failure. So in America you don’t have teams. You don’t have families. Instead you have successful individuals.
Instead of Huawei’s leadership committee supported by the Huawei engineering group, you have Elon Musk.
In Chinese movies the emphasis is on being the best you can be as part of something bigger. While in American movies it is the individual that fights against all odds.
This next clip is a Chinese war drama. Notice the depictions of bravery for the community of friends. It’s all very Chinese, but maybe…
…just maybe…
…it’s that we are all part of something bigger, and we need to contribute to it.
.
War is not going to help humanity grow.
It’s working together, not fighting apart.
The tale of the thermos
In our culture, well in most cultures, it seems very odd to open up to strangers. It’s difficult to meet them, to talk to them without feeling a jerk. For in most societies the people that tend to come up to you are typically undesirable…
And so we avoid others. We stare at our shoes. We read our cell phones, we look at the scenery, we stare off into space. We do anything and everything possible to not engage into inter-personal contact with others. We self isolate. We go home to our dark home and there we stare into the flickering blue glow of the monitors until the next day, when we get up and drive alone to our destination.
This is undesirable.
Humans are social creatures. We need society. We need to communicate with each other. We need that inter-personal level of relationship.
The next story, is a cute one. It’s about a boy who wants to strike up a communication with a pretty girl, but there is nothing to “break the ice with”, just his thermos.
.
This is the central theme behind the first Howard and Kumar movie; Harold and Kumar go to White Castle (plus a heady dose of smoking that marijuana.)
Help others by active participation…
The next video is from the Middle East. And a man decides to help a beggar out. And maybe the point is clear. Rather than pass by, or rather than just give him a coin. Perhaps assisting in a more active way…
…even if it seems trivial…
…is important.
I personally believe that every action that we perform has meaning and substance. Everything that we do, and every thought that we have, all combine towards the reality that we create for ourselves. Maybe the fellow in the video cannot change this beggars life, nor does he want to. He just wants to help him out a little bit more.
The world would be a much nicer place to live in, if everyone stopped thinking about themselves and instead abandons the “for-profit” model embraced by the capitalist oligarchy out of Washington DC and starts going on the local level ….
…helping each other out.
.
And from Europe we have a similar themed movie. And in this one the same type of action is performed. The point should be clear, you all…
…all over the world…
…most especially in Asia…
…people are waking up to the realization that we all must contribute to the well being of each other, and that the greedy “mine, mine, mine…” oh, you are “bad and evil, we must destroy you“, and all the bans, the nonsense and the hate must end. It is a time that is long over due.
.
Funny thing about all these videos.
I pulled them off of DouXing which is the Chinese version of Tiktok. You know, the one that Donald Trump banned in the United States for “natural security reasons“.
Perhaps, if you are an American, you will need to destroy your computer now because you watched these dangerous videos with their dangerous ideas. You don’t want the American thought police to come banging in your door and arrest you.
Do you?
It always gets me when the American press says that there can't be peace without "democracy" and "liberalization."
Huh ... try 20 million dead in America's wars since WW II.
And as for "democracy," living in America I would love to see some of it.
Posted by: Mike from Jersey | Jan 5 2021 20:41 utc | 12
Conclusion
I think the main problem are the two different approaches taken by the US or Chinese, which are diametrically different. The Chinese seem to use a "Cumulative" approach, while the US is based on what I call "Winnowing" as a state. Take their respective attitudes towards the poor.
First the Chinese; Cumulative, we are all in this together. If everyone has a "job" be it ever-so lowly, selling food on a street corner for example, then for the Chinese this is a "plus". The person is more or less responsible for his own well being, is not a burden on the State for handouts, and could be (potentially) taxable etc. The object being that ALL Chinese then become positive factors in the society. They are also more motivated because they have a "place" in society. The recent case of Jack Ma and an IPO is not the opposite, but he was trying to get ahead by means that would have led to more unemployment - on the back of the Chinese Government. He was not adding to the cumulative good of the country. Only his own riches. (The Chinese do have billionaires and riches - but are constrained by Corporate credit ratings as explained on a previous - very interesting - thread. Thanks to: psychohistorian | Jan 5 2021 2:08 utc | 162. The MoA Week In Review - OT 2021-001)
The US. The attitude is to beat out the chaff leaving only the "kernel". To "Winnow" the population leaving only the top. ie the poor are sidelined, they become a problem for the Government (needing support, food etc.). A net negative value to US society. (The Rich also get handouts from the Fed. as free money has become an habitude, but that is an another way of winnowing out the chaff - as others do NOT get the trillion dollar handouts) The poor have no "place" in a society that has rejected them and so are less motivated. They must fend for themselves and are expected to obey. If they do not there are always the police to enforce obedience.
"Cumulative = win-win", and "Winnowing = Only the top win".
Posted by: Stonebird | Jan 5 2021 20:26 utc | 11
The world is changing, and it is a good thing. Awareness of it, and awareness of our role in the world is very important. And we do not need to subscribe to any service, pay any fee or provide any user login information to participate. All that matters is to smile, and be more open to the world around you.
Who knows what interesting people you might meet?
Do you want some more of this?
I have more posts along these lines in my Rufus index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
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December 2020 is almost upon us. This entire year has been shit, and I want to gallop away from it as fast as my two legs can carry me. I tire of the SHTF stuff about the United States and all the Trade stuff regarding China and international Geo-political issues. Instead, I just want to munch, chill and cozy up with some wine and a loved one. (Rent-a-loved one, a much beloved pet, or a favorite family members are all acceptable.)
I have been musing about how different things are today than they were when I was a young ‘un. And indeed, it does seem that time has completely rewrote reality. Whether it is my experiences in hopping crazy world-lines, or that the world has indeed moved on, who actually knows? I don’t. Not really, and I really don’t wanna think about it any more. One thing for certain is that it sure is different.
Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody
Here, I want to chat about some of the things that I “miss” from my past. Well, nope “miss” isn’t exactly the right word. Say, “muse about”. You know change is a part of life, and good change is wonderful and bad change isn’t all that great. Truth this. And don’t tell me that you don’t agree.
Here’s one thing everybody who was alive during the 1970s can agree on: The entire decade still feels like it only happened yesterday. Seriously, how can the ’70s be five decades in the past? Really?
It’s just not possible that the era ruled by bell-bottom jeans and 8-track cassettes was half a century ago. For those of us who lived through it—and survived that groovy yet perilous time—it will forever be a part of our souls. That and the roach burns in our jeans, the stain of bong water on our shag carpets, and the earth shoes in our closets. Let go to the max! and realize that not everyone reading this is a space cadet. Some might be out to lunch, but you know, it’s all cool beans!
So take a chill pill, and I’ll give you the skinny on what’s going on. Who knows? Maybe I’ll catch you on the flip side.
Waiting for the phone
Having a phone full of APPs where you can call anyone, at any time, and share Social media did not exist and was unheard of. It was Science Fiction. For us, our telephones were hard-wired to the house. And that was that.
A scene from the televisions show “The Brady Bunch”. Having cords attached to the house when dealing with telephones was a normal event.
Everybody in the ’70s had just one phone in their house. It was a rotary phone that stayed in some central location, with a cord that could only be stretched so far. If someone was on that phone, you just had to sit and wait for them to finish. Family members hogging the phone were the cause of many sibling battles during this era. And I would have to say that the leading culprits were the young high school females in the household.
Telephones have come a long way from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Most homes back then only had one phone for the entire family whether there were three people or twelve people. That’s right… people had to get in line to get on the line! It wasn’t uncommon for the cord to be stretched out of shape since the user could only hope for privacy by getting as far away from the other family members as possible.
Pretending to be “bionic”
No body ever does this today. But, back in the day, it was a “thing”.
The Six Million Dollar Man.
If you truly are a ’70s kid, we don’t need to explain what’s involved in pretending you’re bionic. But for those who aren’t, you simply start running in slow motion, and then you make a sound with your tongue that sounds vaguely robotic. Decades after The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman were canceled, trying to imitate Steve Austin or Jaime Sommers still makes us feel powerful.
Today, if they tried to remake this series it would be called “The 6 Trillion Dollar Person”.
Playing Simon
This game came out as I was entering University. At that time I was heavily into beer, and girls. But my younger brothers and sisters were addicted to this little piece of electronic wizardry.
Simon.
So simple, and yet so addictive. When this electronic game came out in 1978, every kid had to have one. The gameplay wasn’t too involved—you just had to tap on the right series of four colored buttons to repeat a sound pattern—but we played it with the intensity and focus that kids play Fortnite today.
Gas station lines
At the time of the “Oil Crisis”, my father was commuting a three hour drive back and forth from our home to his new job. The petrol-political situation just made everything tougher. And I well remember having to ride to the gas station and collect all sorts of plastic containers of gas that I would fill up and then siphon back into my dads car.
Did you know that the thick PE containers would crack if you stored gasoline in them in sub-zero temperatures? Guess how I found out? Yeah. Let me tell youse guys icy below freezing gasoline at -20F is still liquid and freezes the cockles of your mouth.
Terrible national management brought this disaster to the door-steps of America.
The 1973 oil crisis (and the second oil crisis a few years thereafter) caused a nationwide panic resulting in around-the-block gas station lines that never seemed to move. Some stations even started posting color-coded flags: Green indicated they still had gas, while red alerted customers that they were out. Every car trip you took with your family in the ’70s felt like it might be your last.
Boogie life! Roller disco parties
Don’t laugh. Whether you lived in the city or in the country, there were always parties at the local roller rink. They installed flashing strobe lights, a DJ, some neon, and before you knew it, we were all boogieing on down!
Party on! So very groovy!
All the fun of a discothèque with the extra awkwardness of having wheels on your feet. We might all remember these parties fondly, but it’s a miracle we didn’t break any bones trying to dance along to a Bee Gees song while skating at frightening speeds.
Love Train
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Teenagers at the time, just like now, couldn’t get enough of their favorite artists including Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith just to name a few. All bets were off though at the roller rink. When the lights went down low and the sparkling disco ball shined on the wooden floor, tacky organ music was just fine!
After getting inside the roller rink, the next thing to do was to go stand in another line to get a pair of skates. Of course, to use a pair of skates that belong to the rink, you had to turn your own shoes in as place holders for the borrowed skates. You got your street shoes back only when the skates were returned. I can still see the wooden wheels and smell the disinfectant spray used on the skates between sessions.
We roller-boogied everywhere. And when we did it on the street, we wore appropriate attire, don’t you know. Such as this…
Ready to boogie!
Yikes!
“Free skate” time was awesome. Everyone would go around and around that floor. It was a time to show off your cool moves. The fancy skaters whizzed, by skating backwards, leaving you in their dust. The skaters with extraordinary skills would show off their abilities in the center of the rink. They were the ones that had their own skates and didn’t use the rented ones. Often, they would stroll into the rink with their skates hanging around their necks like a piece of jewelry.
Roller Skate Rentals
Ai! Now this is something you don’t see any more…
Rollerskate Rentals.
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By the end of the evening, the borrowed roller skates were sweaty and had caused at least one blister on the skater’s feet. That was just part of the deal. A person knew when they got there that they would get that blister. Hopefully, it would heal in time for the following weekend.
After taking off the roller skates and putting your own shoes back on, it took a few minutes to get your legs used to being off of the skates. It was a weird feeling being 2 inches shorter, although that’s how tall you were when you got there. It is something everyone should experience at least once.
The 70’s really were a time like no other.
Coveting an Atari video game console
Atari console
No, you may not have owned an Atari console during the ’70s, but at the very least you knew somebody who did and you made sure to do everything in your power to win their friendship. The very idea of playing video games in the comfort of our own homes without ever worrying if we had enough quarters seemed unfathomably futuristic.
Annoying (or being annoyed by) your sibling on road trips
I don’t know if this happens or not. In the days before electronic media, all that you could do when you were trapped inside an automobile is either listen to the AM radio or pester the heck of your siblings.
A Brady Bunch Living Room.
But that didn’t stop you from going on road trips! When a family piled into the station wagon for a long trek across the country in the ’70s, kids didn’t have the distractions they enjoy today.
There were no iPads or smartphones to keep us occupied. The only way to pass the time was to see how much we could torture our brother or sister sitting in the backseat with us. It was either annoy or be annoyed, the latter of which required constantly demanding justice from your oblivious parents trying to ignore you both in the front seat.
Waiting until Saturday for cartoons
Well, this isn’t exactly true. There were after-school cartoons that we would watch. Namely “The Flintstones”. But for a real marathon of cartoon gluttony, it’s Saturday Morning non-stop comic-thon.
All I can say is “Yabba Dabba Doo!”.
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If you wanted to watch Bugs Bunny or Fred Flintstone or any of your favorite cartoon characters, you had only one chance to catch them—Saturday morning. If you missed it, you missed it, and those precious few hours of animated bliss were gone forever (or at least until the next Saturday). It taught us important lessons about delayed gratification. It just wasn’t possible back then to see every cartoon ever made with the press of a button.
The Watergate hearings
It was a simpler time. President Nixon was impeached for erasing 18.5 minutes of personal tapes. Today, the government vacuums up every item of your life in 3D, indexes it, and sells it off to the highest bidder, and then bills you for it in the form of higher taxes.
President Nixon, remember him?
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Even if you didn’t give a hoot about politics, everyone was at least vaguely aware that something bad was happening in Washington. It was the topic of every dinner party conversation, and the evening news reported each new detail like the Watergate scandal might very well be the downfall of democracy.
Seeing the disgraced Richard Nixon leave the White House forever (with his iconic two handed peace symbol hand wave) and get into a helicopter was one of the most unforgettably surreal moments of TV viewing for just about everybody in the country in the ’70s.
Living in a world without Darth Vader
Darth Vader.
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The ’70s was the last decade when a person could wake up one day having no idea who Darth Vader was—and by dinner that night their head would be spinning with thoughts of the Dark Side and black helmets and lightsabers. The world was suddenly divided between “before Star Wars” and “after Star Wars,” and nothing would be the same for us again.
Suddenly true and real “evil” stopped being Hitler and his evil Nazi horde, and it became a large Empire. One with tentacles in everyone’s business, in every corner of the known world, and one led by indescribably evil people.
Being oblivious to “stranger danger”
In the 1970’s we were innocents. We lived life, and while there were bad people about, we didn’t have them thrown into our faces 24-7. We didn’t see missing kids on milk cartons, Amber alerts, screeching television shows and exposes of predators. We were insulated from all that.
Kids were allowed to be kids.
The world was no less dangerous for kids in the 1970s than it is today—our parents just weren’t as freaked out about it. Many of us weren’t warned that every unfamiliar face might mean us harm. So we made friends with just about everyone, even random adults that we didn’t recognize.
For me, it was cranking “The immigrant song” by Led Zeppelin at 100, and playing games with my buds. While “Pee Eck” or “Joe Piney” had an record album open and was using it to separate the stems and seeds out of a five dollar bag that we had bought. Heh heh.
Memorizing the lyrics to “Rubber Ducky”
LOL. How true is this?
Rubber Ducky…
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There was a limited amount of quality TV for kids in the ’70s, so when something came along that resonated with us, it burned into our subconscious. Sesame Street provided many of those pivotal memories.
Rubber Ducky
Rubber Ducky, you're the one,
You make bathtime lots of fun,
Rubber Ducky, I'm awfully fond of you;
(woh woh, bee doh!)
Rubber Ducky, joy of joys,
When I squeeze you, you make noise!
Rubber Ducky, you're my very best friend, it's true!
(doo doo doo doooo, doo doo)
Every day when I
Make my to the tubby
I find a little fella who's
Cute and yellow and chubby
(rub-a-dub-a-dubby!)
Rubber Ducky, you're so fine
And I'm lucky that you're mine
Rubber ducky, I'm awfully fond of you.
(repeat chorus)
Rubber Ducky, you're so fine
And I'm lucky that you're mine
Rubber ducky, I'm awfully fond of -
Rubber ducky, I'd like a whole pond of -
Rubber ducky I'm of -
Rubber ducky I'm awfully fond of you!
(doo doo, be doo.)
Even today, long past the age when we’re regularly taking baths with toys, we can recall Ernie’s ode to his rubber duckie in its entirety.
Bell bottoms
Bell Bottom Jeans. (“Elephant bells” shown.)
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You cannot say “the 70’s” without mentioning the iconic “bell bottom jeans”. They were everywhere. And they were awesome! Most especially when worn with Rock-star platform boots, or earth-shoes.
A lot of completely groovy adults thought bell bottoms looked stylish in the ’70s, and they were right-on! And you know, it’ the cool kids have historically always been eager to imitate the best of adults’ instincts. So obviously, we all had these fantasticly stylish attire.
Short shorts and tube socks
Yes. And it does seem… obscene, now doesn’t it?
Tube socks, bikes and skateboards.
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Rarely in the history of fashion has a clothing style been universally accepted by both men and women. But that was the case in the ’70s with short shorts and tube socks, even though nobody looked especially good in the getup. In hindsight, tube socks that stretched up to your knees and shorts that were way too tight wasn’t the most flattering combo. But at the time, we all thought we looked cool.
The girls looked better in Tube Socks than the guys.
Do you feel like we do?
Perhaps nothing says 1970’s as the Peter Frampton (live) ode to that period in time. It’s… well, what if all felt like. And if you don’t understand… well… you needed to be there and live that lifestyle.
The 1970’s for us was like this kind of soft fog. Like walking in a fluffy pillow everywhere, and it was really, really surreal.
Do you feel like we do?
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The 1970’s for us was like this kind of soft fog. Like walking in a fluffy pillow everywhere, and it was really, really surreal.
Oh, did I say that? Oh.
Well. I mean that. You know. Like I REALLY mean that. Yeah.
Oh. What was I saying?
Oh yeah…
I’d give you the original song for free here, but apparently it’s all monetized right now. So I’ll just give you the link…
Hitchhiking
True hitchhiking is just as dangerous as it ever was, but we did it anyways. Back then, we were not a fearful as people are today. We are not blasted with stories of the gruesome things that can happen to young folk on the road. And even if that were to happen, many of us would probably try to fight back with our pocket knives or fists.
Cute girls hitchhiking.
No car? No problem! Just stick out your thumb and wait for a kind stranger to pull over and offer you a ride. It seems unthinkable today, but for a ’70s free spirit who didn’t have the bread to buy their own car (or was too young for a license), hitchhiking seemed like the best option when your own two feet couldn’t get you there.
You could hitchhike anywhere, and the police wouldn’t bother you. You could even hitchhike down town!
Having a favorite Charlie’s Angel
We all did. Don’t be silly.
Which brings up a song from the 1970’s. I don’t know why I have this connection of the song to the TV show. I attribute it to me coming home from a long day of partying and listening to Manfred Mann, and then settling down and watching Charlie’s Angels on the tube. I guess that; that is as good as an explanation as anything else.
Manfred Mann’s earth band – Manfred Mann’s Earth Band Blinded By The Light..mp3
Oh, and here’s the gals…
Charlie’s Angels.
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Some kids were always rooting for Jaclyn Smith, and some only had eyes for Kate Jackson. The vast majority of us, however, were smitten with Farrah Fawcett, and not just because she had the most iconic poster of the ’70s (and, arguably, of all time). Whatever your preference, they were the coolest crime-fighting trio on TV, and proof that ladies could kick as much criminal butt as the boys.
Woo Woo!
Farrah Fawcett was everywhere.
Going outside without sunscreen
Oh. Of course we knew about sunscreen. We could go ahead and use it. “Tans don’t burn with a Coppertone tan”. It’s just that we didn’t care…
California, 1977
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These days, most health-conscious people won’t even leave the house on a winter day without slathering their exposed skin in sun protection. But in the ’70s, you could walk around shirtless on a blazing hot summer day and nobody would think to ask if you’d applied any sunscreen.
Wait, sorry, we mean suntan lotion.
There was limited sun protection in the ’70s, just lotion to help you get some color. And when you didn’t get a tan, you got a sunburn—which nobody took all that seriously. There’s a lot we didn’t know about the long-term consequences.
We used suntan lotion to give our burns a bronze hue. Not to protect the skin.
Chase-lounges
This was just about the only way to hang out outside. You get a flimsy aluminum frame with the cheap nylon ribbing and plop down and pop a beer. That is what the 1970’s was all about.
Relaxing outside with the family.
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Do you want to hear a story about a date where I was tripping balls, it was a hot and humid evening, I sat in a chase lounge chair that fit like a glove. My icy cold PBR was next to me, and Traffic, Robin Trower, and Led Zeppelin played all night. After the beer was quaffed, my date and I rode on the foggy river at 3am in a small speedboat. Oh, and her brother couldn’t speak. He was deaf and dumb. So the entire event was in slow motion, sign language.
The 70’s. Youse kids have no idea.
It’s how we rolled
No helmets, knee or elbow protection, and no one recording it to post on Social Media. It’s how we rolled.
It’s how we rolled.
It’s how we rolled.
Then, when we were old enough to get our driver’s license, we started to terrorize the neighborhood righteously…
Scene from Dazed and Confused. Driven by Ben Affleck’s character Fred O’Bannion, this commanding Plymouth Duster was nicknamed the “Grey Ghost.” This beautiful car was driven by an unsavory character in the film, and thus the body paint was something resembling very opaque primer.
Wood Paneling
There isn’t anything that says 1970’s than a house with interior wood paneling. My own parents installed it in our television room around 1973. You simply cut it to size and then glue it to the walls.
Paneled den.
The metric system
Learn the metric system.
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Thanks to the Metric Conversion Act of 1975, we were all prepared to start measuring things in meters, liters, and grams rather than feet, pounds, and quarts. It’s hard to overstate how big a deal this was in the late ’70s, especially if you were a kid. In school, we were inundated with pro-metric system films, which tried to win us over with the adventures of the Metric Marvels. You couldn’t find a kid today stressed out about metric conversion, but in the ’70s, we all lived with the fear that we’d have to be metric-ready at a moment’s notice.
Drinking beer
It’s true that there were laws about drinking alcohol. But they weren’t really enforced. The min-age to drink was 18, and even 16 in some states. And in states where you could work (with parent’s permission) at 14, and drive as well, no one gave a rat’s ass about whether your were drinking alcohol or not. It wasn’t a big thing.
Not like today.
Drinking was no big thing.
If the police caught you drinking underage, they would probably pour it out and tell you to drive home safely and go to bed.
Which happened on more than a few occasions.
Today… well, let’s be real. You’d spend the night in Jail and probably need to fork out a few thousand to a bail bondsman to get out so that you can go to work.
Some things never change
Ah. When going through some of these photos, I see things that could have very well been taken today…
Drive-by “mooning”.
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Some things never change.
Though, you might get arrested for sexual indecency and become a “Sex Offender” for the rest of your life.
Brutal playground equipment
Playgrounds in the ’70s were about as user-friendly as modern-day adult obstacle endurance races. Sure, there wasn’t as much barbed wire, but the equipment was just as unforgiving and brutal.
Two story slide was the norm in the 1970s.
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Monkey bars were made of cold steel that could break bones without mercy. Everything—from the slides to the seesaws, the swings to the merry-go-round—was built to withstand military strikes, and no ’70s kid would use them without anticipating at least the occasional bloody injury.
Modern safe playground. No taller than one yard high.
Being terrified to go in the water
Not everyone was, but enough of my friends were that I thought that they were really too-caught-up. I strongly believed that they needed to “loosen up” a bit.
Jaws
When Steven Spielberg’sJaws first hit the theaters in 1975, it’s hard to quantify exactly how big an impact it had on our collective psyche. We weren’t just scared of getting into the ocean—even lakes and ponds and wading pools seemed to disguise shark fins. We looked for sharks virtually everywhere, certain that their ferocious fangs were just waiting to bite down hard on our toes and pull us underwater.
Smallpox vaccine scars
It’s a sign of being a “Baby Boomer”.
Smallpox vaccine
Before most doctors stopped routinely giving smallpox vaccines in the early ’70s, every kid had the same familiar scar on their upper arm, caused by the two-pronged needle that punctured our skin with all the delicateness of a staple gun. Yeah, it was scary, but smallpox was eradicated. And the fact that we all had the same scars almost felt like a badge of honor.
Being tricked into learning by Schoolhouse Rock!
Schoolhouse Rock!
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Saturday morning is supposed to be about eating sugary cereals and vegging out in front of the TV, watching animated shows with no educational content whatsoever. But the Schoolhouse Rock! shorts tricked us, teaching us about multiplication, history, and the differences between conjunctions and interjections without our even realizing it.
Thanks to their catchy songs, we knew all about the different branches of government and what carbon footprints are without ever cracking open a book.
Having the Oscar Mayer commercial stuck in your head
That Oscar Mayer commercial with the cute kid fishing while eating bologna played so often—and was so catchy—we could hear the familiar melody reverberating around our brains over and over and over.
Oh, I’d love to be an Oscar Meyer weiner
That is what I’d truly like to be
‘Cause if i were an Oscar Meyer weiner
Everyone would be in love with meOh, I’m glad I’m not an Oscar meyer weiner.
That is what I’d never wanna be
‘Cause if i were an Oscar Meyer weiner
there would soon be nothing left of meAnother variation is:I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Weiner
That is what I’d truly like to be
‘Cause if i were an Oscar Meyer weiner
Everyone would be in love with meOh, I’m glad I’m not an Oscar meyer weiner.
That is what I’d never wanna be
‘Cause if i were an oscar meyer weiner
Everyone would take a bite of me.
The only thing worse was when it got replaced by that “I’d like to teach the world to sing” Coca-Cola commercial! (We’re sorry.)
School assignments printed on ditto machines
And oh they smelled so good!
In 1960s and '70s-era classrooms, it was an olfactory treat whenever the teacher passed out fresh-off-the-machine purple print “ditto” sheets to the class. Virtually every student immediately held the page to his face and inhaled deeply.
-11 Smells That Are Slowly Disappearing | Mental Floss
Personal anecdotes from family members tell of the time when teachers would ask a student to head down the hall. That student would walk on over to the room housing the mimeograph. From there, he or she could get the many copies of that day’s worksheet, printed in that unique, pretty purple ink.
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When I was in elementary school in the 1960s and into the early 1970s, teachers gave homework and classroom assignments, quizzes and tests on Ditto worksheets. We wrote on them so often that my classmates and I became intimately familiar with the aniline purple color of the Ditto—as well as the mesmerizing smell that emanated from the freshly printed sheets.
Making Dittos was a two-step process. The first step was to prepare the master, a two-ply form that had an easy-to-write-on paper sheet on top and a wax-coated sheet on the bottom. Our teachers would either hand write or typewrite the schoolwork onto one of these typically letter-size Ditto master forms. The pressure of the pen or the typewriter would transfer wax from the bottom sheet onto the back of the top sheet.
The second step—after discarding what was left of the bottom sheet—was to mount the master, bottom side up, onto the Ditto duplicating drum. The wrong-reading wax image contained the “ink” that was progressively broken down by the chemical spread across the drum as it was rotated—often by cranking the cylinder manually—and came into contact with the paper. Several dozen Ditto sheets could be easily produced within minutes.
Any worksheet or homework assignment passed out to students in a ’70s classroom was likely created using either a ditto or mimeograph machine. Who could forget the way they left purple ink on your fingers, or that unmistakable odor?
Using Silly Putty to preserve newspaper comics
Sillyputty
We felt like geniuses for discovering that Silly Putty could be rolled over the comic section in a newspaper and perfectly reproduce our favorite Garfield strip. Today, most newspapers use non-transferable ink, so any kids wanting to try this experiment are out of luck. Sigh.
Slide Rules
Call me a nerd, but I loved my slide-rule. Unlike my fellow classmates, who embraced their new fangled calculators that were just coming out, I used mine for all sorts of engineering and science subjects.
Slide Rule
There is even an application for a slide rule for your Windows Computer. You can go ahead and get it HERE. Or better yet, check out these links…
Not at all useful, but a joy to behold and quite beautiful in it’s own way.
Pencil cases with attached slide rulers and sharpeners
Pencil box. We all had one.
It was an essential school supply back in the ’70s, the epitome of high-tech pencil gadgetry. Pulling one of these out of your backpack meant you were serious about learning—or at least looking like the coolest student in your class. Pencil cases have become as extinct as… well, pencils. But the plastic pencil case in 1975 was the iPhone of its era.
Never consuming Pop Rocks and soda at the same time
Pop Rocks Candy
Every ’70s kid had heard that terrible rumor about Mikey, the picky eater in the Life cereal commercial. Apparently, despite the warnings of his friends, he had consumed the deadly combo of Coca-Cola and Pop Rocks, and the carbon dioxide had caused his stomach to inflate to a lethal degree. What happened next? Well, his stomach exploded, of course, and poor Mikey died on the spot! The rumors were, of course, completely false. But that didn’t stop us from believing them. In a world without Internet, we had no choice but to trust what the smartest kid on the playground was telling us.
Moving the TV antenna for better reception
We called them “rabbit ears”.
And we used them is “complete” systems like this…
1970s Audio-visual entertainment.
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TV reception in the ’70s was unreliable at best. If the picture was distorted with zig-zag lines—or, worse, the dreaded “snow,” where everything was fuzzy—the only way to fix the problem was to adjust the antenna, otherwise known as “rabbit ears.”
This involved twisting and turning until slowly, so slowly, you captured a better signal and the picture started to come into focus. But even then, just removing your hands might cause the picture to disappear yet again. It was a long and arduous process to get the kind of visual consistency that TV audiences today take for granted.
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But, on the other hand, television was FREE.
You didn’t need to subscribe to cable, to a television satellite service, or some kind of streaming internet service. And it is still free, too. It’s just one of those way-under-reported elements of life that exists today in a world full of gigantic multimillionaires ruling over a land where everything has a price tag.
...don't knock tv antennas. use them and you'll still get plenty of channels and save lots of money and not be a slave to the cable company. shame on saying it's something you're glad to get rid of
-x60hz11RonaldFelder
Typewriters
Before Microsoft Word were Word Processors, and before them were typewriters.
Electric Typewriter.
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Decades before email or texting existed, if you were writing to a friend or family member, you either did it by hand—a long and excruciating process, especially if you had a lot to say—or you used a typewriter. The unmistakable metallic clang of typewriter keys pounding on paper is something that few of us who lived through the ’70s will ever forget.
Secondhand smoke everywhere
And the freedom was glorious.
Smoking on an airplane.
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Smoking wasn’t just acceptable in the ’70s—it was ubiquitous. In offices, restaurants, airplanes, homes, and most public buildings, everybody was puffing away on their cigarettes without a care in the world. No busybody is going to tell you to go outside in the rain to smoke near the gutter or trashcan. No one even cared.
People smoked everywhere. Restaurants, parks, in taxi’s, on the train,at work and on airplanes.
Secretary smoking at her desk in the office.
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People smoked. It was as natural as drinking Pepsi and eating a hamburger. The prices for cigarettes were very cheap, and no one had the nerve to tell you what to do with your own body. It was unheard of. And if you did, the response probably would be “Hey Man! What’s your fucking problem?”
Smoking in the kitchen of a tiny apartment at 7:35 PM. Notice the brown refrigerator, the rabbit ears for the television, the tumbler of beverage on a table on top of a napkin, and the enormous salt and pepper shakers.
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And those wooded crate that her books were in, those are crates for eggs. I used them for my record album collection. In those days they were real wood. Flimsy things, but they did the job all rightly.
Headsets for the Stereo
Well, we have headsets today, but they are used differently. Back in the 1970’s if you had a stereo, you also probably had a pair of headsets. And while your parents might have bought them for you so that they could have some peace and quiet, the chances are that you probably used them while the stereo was blasting through the speakers. You know, for the “full effect”.
Wearing headsets on your bed.
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This is what we pretty much did. Here’s a scene from the iconic movie “Dazed and Confused”.
Dazed and Confused.
Debating what “American Pie” was all about
Don McLean’s American Pie.
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What was going on in Don McLean’s 1971 hit? Nobody knew for sure, but plenty of kids had a lot of theories about who the jester was and why he was stealing the king’s thorny crown, and if “Jack” was supposed to be Mick Jagger or Bob Dylan or somebody else entirely. Was the whole song really about Buddy Holly dying in a plane crash and McLean feeling sad about it? In those pre-internet days, your guess was as good as anybody else’s.
Macramé home décor
Macramé home décor was especially popular in the ‘70s. A lot of different home decorations were macramé including curtains and plant hangers, but nothing was more popular than the macramé owl.
An ideal 1970’s home.
The groovy pop-culture era is a phenomenon that stands out among many others. Sometimes it seems like it was a million years ago and sometimes it seems like just yesterday. Check out this “far out”, very cool kitchen…
1970’s kitchen.
Shaking “instant” Polaroid photos to help them develop faster
Polaroid.
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As Outkast reminded the world with their 2003 hit “Hey Ya!,” the ’70s taught us how to “shake it like a Polaroid picture.” Or at least, that’s what we all believed. The moment a new picture slid out of a Polaroid instant camera, we pinched it between two fingers and shook it vigorously, as if air drying was the only way to get the clearest image. It wasn’t until 2004 when we finally learned it was all bogus. As Polaroid helpfully explained, “shaking or waving has no effect.”
Bicycle helmets not being required
It’s pretty silly that a government that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the people, would require them to do all sorts of things “for their safety”. But that’s America for you.
Freedom is not having to wear a motorcycle helmet.
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If you wore a helmet while riding a bike during the ’70s, it meant either that you were recovering from a serious cranial injury or you were terrified of even the most minor of accidents. We just weren’t as safety-conscious back then.
In those days, freedom actually meant something. it wasn’t confused with “safety” or “cleanness”, like it is today.
Clackers
Everyone had these.
Clackers.
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So simple and yet so entertaining. Consisting of two heavy acrylic balls attached to a string, you basically knocked the two balls together as fast as you could… and that was it. Somehow it kept us entertained for hours, or at least until some kids started overdoing it with the clacker enthusiasm and the balls shattered and caused shrapnel-related injuries. Clackers were deemed weapons of mass destruction and officially pulled from stores.
Me. Well, I put them in an oven and baked them. LOL.
Aluminum can tabs
The 1960’s was known as the time where you needed a triangular “can opener” to open up your favorite can of beer. You would do so with the heavy gauge steel can, and make two triangular indentations. One large one to drink from, and one small one for the air to get in.
Then, in the 1970’s the pull-tab was invented, and life was forever changed.
Pull tab history.
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Opening a soda in the ’70s required pulling a ring that tore open a small wedge shape on the top of an aluminum can. Then the ring would be thrown away, usually on the ground where somebody would invariably step on it and hurt themselves. Injuries from those metallic tabs became a nationwide epidemic.
One 1976 New York Times report remarked that a large percentage of beach injuries “were due to cuts inflicted by discarded pop tabs,” Slate noted. Getting a tetanus shot was the only way to survive in a world littered with soda can tabs.
Fixing mistakes with Wite-Out
Correcting mistakes.
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The “delete” button of the ’70s came in a little jar full of white liquid, which could be painted across anything in a letter or school assignment that we wanted to make disappear. It wasn’t quite as magical as it sounds, since you had to wait for what felt like forever for Wite-Out to dry, and sometimes you had to blow on the paper, which just made you feel ridiculous. By the time it was ready to put back in the typewriter, you’d have completely lost your train of thought.
Sea-Monkeys
Sea Monkeys
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Those ads in the back of comic books were too irresistible for most kids. Why would we not want to have our own anthropomorphic sea creatures, living in a tank and looking reverently out at our bedrooms like we were gods?
But when the Sea Monkeys arrived, we learned the hard lesson that you shouldn’t always believe advertising.
The creatures didn’t look anything like tiny humans at all, because they were actually a type of brine shrimp, the most boring aquarium pet a kid could ever ask for.
Station wagons with wood trim
Ohhhh baby!
So very groovy.
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Why so many people were drawn to cars that looked as if they were made at least partly out of wood is anybody’s guess. Maybe they were responding to some residual hippie influence, and they couldn’t resist a car that was seemingly constructed from biodegradable materials harvested in pesticide-free gardens. It was all bunk, of course—the wood texture, more often than not, was just vinyl siding—but especially in the ’70s, appearance was more important than reality.
Parents thought it was perfectly safe to let kids make their own artsy crafts by putting plastic in the oven. Totally cool. We were able to mix chemicals, and bake them in ovens and crate all sorts of wondrous dangers. Thingmaker came with it’s own oven. It was glorious!
It introduced me to molds, plastic injection molding and hardware design.
The concept of the Thingmaker was first introduced in 1963, as an extension of Mattel’s “Vac-U-Maker” line. Thingmaker Creepy Crawlers by Mattel was by far my absolute favorite toy as a kid and I got my first one in 1968.
I spent hours in my room playing with this and spilling plastic goop on my carpet. I loved overfilling the metal molds just slightly so I could peel off the excess. I burned myself more than a few times and have the scars to show. I also had Creeple People and Incredible Edibles, but neither of these was as cool as the original Thingmaker. I cannot believe I played with this toy totally unsupervised starting at the age of 10!
There have been several revivals of the Thingmaker – the first in 1978 was called the Thingmaker II and employed safer technology. This toy used a totally different type of goop and plastic molds, into which the heated Plastigoop was poured.
The reformulated Plastigoop did not work well, the bugs and insects were shoddy, and the process was painfully slow, so it went kaput fairly quickly. In 1992, ToyMax reintroduced the Thingmaker with much stricter safety regulations. This new version of the Creepy Crawlers set once again used metal molds and a goop similar to the original.
ToyMax went out of business around 2002, and yet another company, Jakks Pacific started producing a similar toy starting in 2006.
The Vac-u-Form, also called Vac-u-Former, was a toy manufactured by Mattel in the 1960s. Using an industrial process called vacuum forming, a rectangular piece of plastic was clamped in a holder and heated over a metal plate. After the plastic softened, the holder was moved to the other side, over a mold of the object to be formed. Pressing a handle on the side of the unit created a vacuum, which caused the plastic to be sucked down over the mold and form a shape. When the plastic cooled it solidified, creating a little model of the item, such as a car, boat, or tiny log cabin
-Consumer Grouch
The Pacer
My first car after I wrecked my GTO. Sigh! I loved that car.
But the Pacer, or the Pacer-rooo as we liked to call it was perfect for the era. It was like riding in this big quiet glass bubble, and we would listen to tunes and watch the world go by…
…slowly. Very slowly.
My grandmother loved my Pacer. She thought it was a robust, well built car.
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Pink Floyd – Sheep
Drinking tons of Tang
My personal formula was 50% of the glass filled with Tang powder, and the remaining part water.
Tang advertisement.
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The makers of Tang drove home the idea that their instant beverage, which tasted vaguely of oranges, was the nutrition of choice for astronauts everywhere. And that was enough for us to believe that just drinking Tang for breakfast put you in the same intellectual company as the brave astronauts of NASA. Even though Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, once famously said he was not a fan of Tang, that wasn’t the popular opinion in the ’70s.
Relating to one of the Brady Bunch kids
The Brady Bunch.
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Whether it was ambitious ladykiller Greg or awkward middle child Jan or young dreamer Bobby, there was somebody among The Brady Bunch that resonated with just about every ’70s kid. The oversized family that was too perfect to exist in the real world somehow still managed to reflect our individual quirks and idiosyncrasies.
Metal lunch boxes
1970s Lunch Boxes
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A plastic lunch box? That would’ve seemed inconceivable to a ’70s kid, who proudly carried around a lunch box sturdy enough to protect bologna sandwiches from an air strike. The characters featured on the front of these lunch boxes, whether Evel Knievel or Strawberry Shortcake, said a lot about our personalities.
48 Hassocks
Round ottoman seats.
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These round ottoman seats became weirdly popular during the ’70s, and always in the most outrageous colors—like avocado green or neon orange. They were meant as foot stools but kids knew they were perfect for stretching out, or curling up on for cat naps, or even spreading out on stomach-first and pretending we were flying like Superman. Ah, those were the days.
Taping songs off the radio
Not every bedroom was so well equipped, but indeed, once we figured out that we could tape the music that we heard on the radio, it was only a matter of time before the high priced sales of record albums would crash.
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The music piracy of its day! When you had a new favorite song but there wasn’t enough in your piggy bank to buy the album or 45 rpm single, you would sit next to the radio with your portable cassette recorder and wait… and wait… and wait… until finally that song you loved so much started playing, and you immediately pressed down on the record button, capturing those beautiful sounds for free.
A chopper bike with a banana seat
Oh baby, I had a burnt orange bike. Tall handle-bars. White banana seat. Red reflectors, and drag-strip rear tire.
A chopper bike with a banana seat.
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You didn’t even have to pop a wheelie when you owned a chopper bike. All you had to do was sit there, tapping your fingers on the handlebars like you were revving a throttle, and you looked like Evel Knievel getting ready to jump over a canyon.
Stretch Armstrong
I didn’t have this, but my brother did, and the tortures that he put this poor toy through were the stuff of legends.
Stretch Armstrong
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This elastic hero was like a stress ball for prepubescents. Just how much torture could Armstrong endure at your hands? Plenty of kids were willing to find out, pulling his limbs like they were trying to get a confession. The secret to Stretch’s durability—the goo inside his body that made him so elastic—was nothing but plain ol’ corn syrup.
Frisbee
Yeah. You can go on all the retro 1970s websites on the internet, and not one single one will mention the iconic Frisbee. This was the most prolific and versatile tools in used during the 1970’s.
Not only could you toss it about, but you could clean out your bag of weed with it. It was portable, convenient, light weight, and came in a wide selection of colors and designs. I well remember my glow in the dark scooby-doo Frisbee. What fun was that!
A fun game of Frisbee on the QUAD.
Shag Carpeting Throughout Your House
This was so 70’s.
I used the left over pieces to carpet my GTO, and then later, my Pacer, and even later than that, my Dodge Tradesman 400.
Shag carpeted home.
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Covering your floors wasn’t as simple as popping into Pottery Barn and picking up a rug in the 1970s. Your house—apart from the patterned linoleum in your kitchen—was covered in shag carpeting in a variety of earthy tones, from moss to pumpkin to, of course, leopard.
Not all homes had carpet during the groovy era. Some still preferred their hardwood floors, but you can be sure that any respectable modern and hip household that did have carpet had shag carpet. Some shag carpet was so shaggy that you could lose the family hamster in it for days.
Having Every Dish Served Out of Patterned Pyrex
Pyrex. An awesome invention and completely under appreciated.
Modern kitchen 1975.
Fancy china has its place, but as a ’70s kid, you know that the true height of sophistication is enjoying your mom’s tuna noodle casserole straight from the Pilgrim-patterned Pyrex it was baked in.
A tuna noodle casserole
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But truthfully, you haven’t lived until you made a “swamp” pizza (Chicago style deep dish pizza) from a Pyrex dish.
Basement Den
Up until the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, basements were a place for the hot water heater, furnace/boiler, and washing machine. Basements were also a great storage area. Basements were stacked with boxes full of things that wouldn’t ever be used again but the owner couldn’t live without!
During the groovy era, “finishing” basements for living space became a popular craze. It wasn’t called a finished basement… it was called a club room; complete with the old TV set and fake wood paneling. It was a classic look.
Many a night would be spent quaffing beers, playing cards, darts, and chess while listening to Neil Young. I’ll tell you what.
Basement Den.
Water bed
This type of bed is pretty cool, and not at all what one would think. If you go on the internet, you might find someone who has never slept on one of these beds writing derogatory statements about them. (It’s a very common thing on the internet these days… you write about what you know nothing about for a hand full of change.)
These beds are really super comfortable. They are heated, and it is like sleeping inside the soft bosom of a giant woman. The sides envelope around you and you feel completely embraced.
Water Bed.
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All jokes aside, this is a super comfortable way to sleep. When I slept on my water bed, I was usually out within two minutes.
Now, for some important notes. Firstly, if the power goes off, in the dead of winter, you can rest assured that you will be sleeping on top of an icy pile of slush. And secondly, you need to constantly add anti-bacteria chemicals. Otherwise algae will grow and your water bed would spring about a zillion super tiny, impossible to locate, leaks.
Lava Lamps
Technically the oddly hypnotic lava lamp was made popular in the 60s, but it continued on strong through almost the end of the 1970s. I actually had two of them, and they really added a nice effect in my bed room.
Lava Lamp.
TV Dinners
We had these little metal folding tables, and a place where we wold put them behind the door. When we were too busy to eat a “real” meal, out came the TV dinners, and we would eat in front of the television learning about the world on the “news”.
TV Dinners.
Do you want more?
I have more posts that are similar to this in my Life and Happiness Index here…
I miss my Orange GTO. In the movie “Dazed and confused”, This car was driven by Kevin Pickford, played by Shawn Andrews. Two vehicles were used for this film, and they were acquired from GTO collectors through the local classified ads. One of the GTOs in Dazed and Confused was powered by a 455 High Output (H.O.) V8, and the entire film crew and cast members were delighted at the car’s ease in burning rubber. Cinematographers love tire smoke, and the GTO in this film delivered plenty of it.
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Can you believe that this is only part one?
Articles & Links
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I have gotten some grief by posting things about Thailand on Metallicman. But people don’t really understand. Thailand is a very spiritual and religious land, and they view sex as something natural and pure.
Not as something ugly, evil and perverted like they do in the United States.
Anyways, here are some treasures. These are micro-videos that were written, directed and take place in Thailand. If you want to have a good look at yourself, then watch these videos and note your reactions to them.
All of these videos are very short movies. Whether they are culled from actual movies or compiled on their own accord is actually unknown. But they are rather nice and exceptional in their own regard. They are about people, situations and relationships. All very Buddhist and all very Thai.
If you want to “feel the pulse” of a nation, you look at it’s society. And for Thailand, you look at the people, the families and the relationships there. I hope that these micro videos puts smiles on your faces and an appreciation for other realities and other cultures.
This is the Thailand that I know…
The is the Thailand that I know and that is hidden by all the bad press out in the West…
This is the Thailand that I know…
I really love this next movie…
And some surprises…
And for the father…
Conclusion
My father would call these movies “schmaltz” and tell me that I was wasting my time watching them. It means “excessive sentimentality, especially in music or movies.” He told me that it’s a “dog eat dog” world out there. That I have to “fight to survive” and that I must do it alone. A “Lone Wolf” style because that is what a Man does and that it is the “American Way”. And that no one is going to come to help me. That I must either succeed or fail. And everything else is just a “waste of my time”.
He was wrong.
We are all part of a community. And if everyone contributes within that community, then the entire community benefits. The lone wolf idea is a failed strategy. For it only results in the occasional lone wolf with the rest of the community struggling and destitute.
You can see this in America today. The nation that completely and absolutely embraces the “lone wolf” society is one with a mere handful of ultra-wealthy, and the rest of the nation is unhappy, destitute and not doing well at all.
And nations like China, that embraces the concept of community first is running “rings” around America. When people work together there is a synergy that transcends the individual contribution. Which has a better defensive mechanism, a lone bee, or a swarm of angry pissed-off bees?
Community. You all should be an ACTIVE participant in your respective communities.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
As the COVID-19 ravishes the United States, a number of interesting articles are appearing. These articles consider the COVID-19 as the “pivot moment” of change that the United States sorely needs. Maybe so, or maybe not. We will see. In any event these articles are interesting, introspective, and poignant. Here is one such article.
This article is titled “The Strength of Broken Dreams” by Matthew J. Peterson and was written on 1APR20, when the COVID-19 just started to turn the United States upside down. It was edited to fit this venue and all credit to the authors.
The Strength of Broken Dreams
“The American Dream” is dead, but America remains.
In the 1960s the American Dream spread quickly through the American mind.
At its best it meant that Americans could fulfill the moderate, but deeply rooted, desire most people have to work, own a home, and raise a family on the income earned by one parent.
At its worst, it was not attached to much more than this—a generic promise of economic and social mobility. The phrase was always ridiculed by intellectuals and activists as much as it was used positively. This is America, after all.
It was always amorphous. But for some time now, the American Dream has been dead, both as concept and as reality. In the coming months, regardless of exactly how long it lasts, millions will be forced to further reevaluate their dreams as the virus takes its toll on our bodies, our economy, and our way of life.
American Dreams
Dreams slip into air outside the grasp of mind the more fully we try to hold onto them. Is their unraveling noble or unsavory? Is their letting go freedom—or slavery?
Today we hold that two parents must work for ideological as well as practical reasons. We’re told the family itself is oppressive. Certainly it is harder for many people to start and raise one, as both lived experience and data show. The suburbs are castigated as evil. Certainly it is now harder in many regions to afford a home in one. The idea of working for the same employer for years and “settling down” was long unthinkable to Millennials, and the “gig economy” celebrated, up until recently.
It made sense to tell people looking for a decent way of life to move to southern California in the 1950s and ’60s. They could buy a home, and their children could go to college and work to become doctors or lawyers. Would you advise an young, aspirational family to move to southern California now, in 2020?
But from the end of World War II to the present day, we have not stopped dreaming. We dreamed many dreams. The American Dream became an increasingly feverish kaleidoscope of dreams, manipulated by many mad masters, both within and without ourselves. Our own desires, as well as our ruling classes, increasingly untethered our dreams from reality. First whimsical and sentimental, Disney’s childhood; then Dionysian, like 70s teenage rock; then hardening into habitual vices pretending to be respectable, responsible adulthood; culminating in denial, dysfunction, and vicious delusions.
These dreams did not ultimately better us or draw us out of ourselves. They did not call us to higher purpose or action. Nor did they finally cause us to go wild, become revolutionary or reactionary, violent, or unrestful.
Instead they acted like cultural ketamine, lulling us into dissociative sleep. In our near past, many have lived in a steady twilight of manicured dreams and illusions, a coma stabilized and maintained by the anaesthetic drip of electronic media, nourished only by the feeding tube of petty consumption. These dreams are coming to an end.
As my friend and colleague James Poulos has frequentlysuggested over the last few years, the rise of digital technology—combined with impoverished, if not dystopian, elite “ethics” and “politics”—have interrupted our dreams and left us disenchanted with the televisual era. We are now collectively waking up to the reality around us: our doddering leaders long past retirement age, our corrupted institutions, our paltry or absurdist political ideologies, our weakened bodies and souls, and, for many, a deep unhappiness and dissatisfaction with present circumstances.
This is the real reason for the rise in deaths of despair despite a historically high level of material prosperity—which is rendered meaningless in context. The first to wake up were those affected most by economic realities, haunted as they were by the dawning perception that no way out, no path forward, no respectable, honored, or fulfilling way of life was available to them. What, in our contested landscape, is the American way of life now?
Our dreams were already dissipating. The coming of the virus has perhaps hastened their demise, widening the demographic range of those waking up in the valley of the real. Trust in our political, cultural, and economic system and its leaders was already waning. Regardless of how long the virus lasts, how many people are now being forced to rethink their education, their status, their work, and the very course of their lives?
The experience of the changes that have only just begun will have deep and personal effects on each of us. Our dreams are unraveling, and we cannot hold onto them.
The Death of Celebrity
Dreams unmasked and untethered, threads unbound.
Celebrity killed people—but the crowd was entertained.
Celebrity routinely, ritualistically killed people, but the crowds that created and sustained them throughout their lives were also entertained by their deaths. For the crowd which they became obliged to serve, a “tragic” death was all part of the final act, drenched in maudlin sentimentality—catharsis on the cheap.
One could never interrupt the show to speak at length of the likely actual causes of their deaths, of their inner wretchedness and pain—whatever propelled them to seek refuge in addictive pleasures. Whatever really haunted them. Whoever managed and directed their lives. Whatever kept them from healing and strengthening themselves and living accountable lives.
“No. Money and fame are good and make you and us, your fans, happy. Let us keep our fantasies,” said the plaintive crowd. “You can’t take them from us. They are ours. They do not condemn us like the heroes of old. They are our living puppets. Our living symbols. And they must die so we can live these fantasies. They must die so we can live in dreams.”
More proximately, the celebrities were the puppets of those who controlled our dreams. When the mechanism of dream creation fails, in part because it has become readily observable, all involved are revealed for what they are. And we no longer care about them. Celebrities singing “Imagine” are no longer likeable, with or without their makeup. They no longer dazzle, and we’d rather see those to whom we have some real connection on our screens. We’d rather see our family and friends than watch these dull strangers off stage without their masks on.
The #metooed men behind the curtains that have lately lifted are uninteresting to us. They are going into retirement as quickly as they can. The galaxy of interwoven mythologies they created has lost its luster, no longer appealing to our inner feelings. Nostalgia, already made uncomfortable by the totalizing “woke” politicization of our media companies, now dwindles as the future becomes more pressing on the present than the memories of childish comforts past.
For the educated classes, the same logic applies to the “news” and what passes for analysis, punditry, and intellectual notoriety. The desire for fame in the 20th century, when the screen was “silver” and the carpets ran red, boiled over briefly onto social media before the reality of digital life devalued all punditry, talking heads, and even the glamour of entertainment itself.
It was always a strange and slavish notion: why would multiple generations of millions of children desire such a thing—to be an actor or musician strutting about the stage, often paid as a part-time employee, “project” by ”project”, show by show, by producers and owners who are actually in charge? One need not be a Socrates nor a Plato to see this as nothing other than a sign of great sickness, of a society in the throes of worsening political disease.
Yet we thought it could go on forever, until it didn’t.
Dissociative Slumber
Dreams deferred? Dreams opaque and vanishing in the nude, once covered in robes that now fall silently like snow to ground.
To live the unexamined life is to be lost to yourself: to be cut off from outside light and air, cultivating an empty darkness within that eventually suffocates even the inner light by which you see yourself, snuffing out your very person. It is a long and difficult journey both to get to such a place, and to journey back—although jolting experiences can hasten the process in both directions. The streaming flood of borrowed dreams, which could not be countered by our broken families and decrepiteducationalsystem, made it possible for masses of people in our lifetimes to approach it.
We spent hours daily looking into screens pretending to substitute for reality. They gave us shared mass dreams and epistemologies by which we saw ourselves and the world at large. As time went on, the televisual medium became less reflective of us as a people and more directive, seeking to influence our way of life in an ever deeper, ever “woker” manner. At the same time, digital technology fractured the shared nature of those dreams and their corresponding epistemologies, allowing for multiple “channels,” voices, and ways of seeing the world that undercut mass control.
The temptation of all human beings in slipstreams of relative peace at home is to go to sleep—to pretend that the vivid drama of good and evil is not playing out within our hearts and minds and across the globe every day. To pretend that one can simply absolve oneself from the pursuit of justice. To pretend that one’s own society or social clan is incorrupt. To laugh off the deepest questions and airily dismiss earnest answers, as if “science” or some “expert” out there has dissected and explained it all. To lazily believe and indulge in distractive fictions and comforting technocratic myths about your world.
Such matters are extraordinarily difficult, after all. That’s what makes individual virtues and political life noble.
But this is also what makes giving up altogether so tempting. If all institutions are perfectly fine—or perfectly corrupted—why bother? This giving up, or refusal to take responsibility, leads to lives cut off from actual politics and real virtues, in which either soft hedonism or asinine idealism of all sorts flourishes. Live Action Role Playing, or idealism, leads in turn to more dashed hopes and dreams, fostering more shallow cynicism. And here we are.
What incidents like the 1619 Project reveal is how deep the suicidal urges of the western world have seeped into the American psyche. People on the Left (and Right) want to denigrate, revile, and blame the founding—our origins and intrinsic system. It makes them feel good. It doesn’t matter what some of the best historians (leaning Left with no bone to pick) say about the truth of the matter. We wanted to believe negative mythology about ourselves.
This is so because we knew something was amiss, but whatever that is we cannot easily discern. 1619 is but one example. It’s not just that it pronounces we are flawed, like every human society (although not every human society is equally good about admitting it). It’s that we want to believe we are intrinsically broken and cannot be fixed—at a time in which we are indisputably the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. This is a spectacle worth meditating on.
We want to believe we cannot change ourselves or our system and that it must break down, or be broken down. It would be one thing if we did so because we wanted something better, but this is by no means clear. Insofar as anyone does seemingly want things to improve there is a deep divide over what would constitute “improvement.” Regardless, this sort of fatalism is often a self-fulfilling prophecy in individual human lives.
We are indeed waking up now, but not in the manner the Social Justice Warriors or Right-wing culture warriors might wish. The virus is yet another quickening event that threatens our posturing. It makes a mockery of our preferred stance and subgroups. It reveals things as they are—and challenges us to confront reality.
The new reality is uncomfortable because it snaps us out of our stupor. The populace, waking up from a long distracted, T.V.-induced sleep, discovers that in real life it’s now often functionally illiterate, increasingly unemployed or engaged in meaningless employment, obese, addicted, and grumpy, if not suicidal. People increasingly feel real fears and have no idea what to do with them.
Meanwhile, our various officially approved groups of rulers are exposed as vapid, apolitical, smoothly medicated drones who wish to live as comfortably as transhumanly possible and are uncomfortable dealing with anything that bursts their finely tuned bubbles. And in differing ways, in digital life everyone seems far more vulgar and vicious than what used to be shown to us “on” the major vehicles of social engineering.
Who will rescue us from them—and ourselves?
The Courage of the Real
You find yourself looking up from the bottom of a large and ancient lake. Disorientated and troubled, you eventually get your bearings. Reflexively longing to reach the sunlit surface, you begin to feel the weight of the deep bearing down on your body. Above the underwater motions of living creatures, your countrymen are engaged in fierce naval battle on the surface. The wreckage and bodies drift downwards, but you cannot rise. Held in place, you can do nothing.
The human soul is difficult to rescue and resuscitate when habitually distant from the real, entranced in a kind of living death. But the jolt of events increasingly allows us to see our caves for what they are. The inner pilot light needs to be lit again, but what will catch? This is the problem America now faces.
The worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves and end up believing. When those lies are taken from us, we are disorientated and feel the pain of their removal. But as we begin to see past them, we see the distance we have created between ourselves and reality, and we despair.
We often don’t tell ourselves outright lies so much as hide from ourselves, shoring fragments against our ruins to hide our ruinous parts from ourselves and others, attempting to cordon off or even willfully self-amputate what we consider undesirable.
We cling desperately to these fragments—these distractive or reflective fictions—as if camouflage, armor, or shelter could turn us into something we think we’d rather be, never mind heal the disease or wounds they might conceal.
Courage is needed first to seek out and confront the truth about yourself and reality, and then to conform and develop yourself accordingly. It takes courage to confront and develop one’s inner life, and above all to conform that life to reality as it is.
We are most often cowards not because we make the effort to run away, but because we merely turn away. We turn our gaze from the truth about our inner and outer reality, and we act according to our willful ignorance.
Having so turned, we too easily recreate ourselves in our own preferred image by way of simplistic amputation, bifurcation, or cosmetic concealment. Over time, we each begin to live within a partial framework of habitual blindness or willful fantasy.
In this sense, certain forms of even physiological mental illnesses or debilitating conditions can often be seen as more extreme forms of what all humans suffer, often at their own hands along with those of others in the same troubled state.
What festering wounds are we hiding? The metastasizing soft hedonism of distraction. The painful brokenness of shattered families. The apolitical “politics” of “naturally” unsocial atomistic gods. Disembodied bodies, puritanically dedicated to amorphous, directionless, prophylactically un-gendered sex within themselves, social only for the sake of attaining a continuous, inner-directed masturbatory self-affirmation.
In a sense there is no “other” when we are all autonomously equal godlike beings. When we forgo seeking fulfillment out there, or simply use what is outside ourselves for our own ends, we discover a certain devilish equality. This the inverse of the natural equality yet buried deep at the heart of the American regime. It is an imposter, born ex nihilo, rather than the substance of human nature.
As in John Lennon’s song, we imagined the impossible. We saw evils mixed up with being. Therefore being itself was evil. So we imagined we were nonbeing, or that we could become so.
We imagined we were pure potential, to be molded within ourselves without any form from the outside. We thought we could share the world because we had nothing to unify us other than our rejection of any religious or political claim to its rightful use. We thought we could attain unity merely by each seeking to use the other for their own purposes. What is everyone’s is no one’s, we thought, and so we should realize we are each no one in the empty solipsism of our self, within which we could form our own being.
In sum, we imagined that our imagining alleviates the unpleasantness of the real by eliminating the central forms of human community. This practically defines everything that went wrong with the televisual era. This was the best we could wish for—the best we could imagine—preferring imagined nonbeing to engaging with the difficulties of the real, which we wanted to evade, or saw no way to resolve. It was to act as if in the here and now we could be either gods or beasts, with nothing possible in between.
This is also the path to power for those who would rule without the bother of deep consent. Get the populace to think they are all perfectly equal, self-sufficient, atomistic little gods who make their own, fully informed, rational choices and arrive at their views the same way: internally, by means of the majesty of their own will and the gloriousness of their own mind, without learning from others outside themselves, least of all leaders or any kind of order or hierarchy. Without taking cues from anyone or anything or any event. Without suspecting that entertainment and advertising no less than punditry and education affects them in anything more than a neutral way.
Flatter them. Get them to think they are independent, free thinkers without ever having to work to think.
Give them leaders they don’t see or acknowledge and a shadow government of hierarchical order which gives them cues. Create and shape events and images that lead them to desire whatever you wish, from within, as if they’d thought of it themselves. Let them project their desires into the emptiness of the images and talking heads while you control the frame and focus, molding their desires. Let the millions of independent, free thinkers each buy millions of the same product so they can show each other they are independent and free.
Enslave them to their own internal desires. Profit and rule.
It’s an old story, forever new.
Reality-#Based Hope
Looking down the trail ahead at dusk, before having to turn back. Looking down the long roads as you pass. Looking up before turning in. Looking up before heading down again.
Tocqueville, in his introduction to Democracy in America, describes how the very people who could have helped shape democracy for the better rejected it for the wrong reasons while the worst people led its rise for all the wrong reasons. As democracy rose regardless, Tocqueville was keenly aware of the screeching, jumbled train wreck that is human existence, tried to describe it, and hoped someone paid attention. Which no one often does, really, until well after the fact.
And that’s life, often enough. To glimpse the contours and predict the directions of the train wreck—which is to see the flaws on all the “sides”—and yet refrain from despair is achievement enough. This alone is so difficult that, to clean things up, people generally construct or retreat into another’s ideological fantasy world. To fight to see the real is hard enough, and then we find it hard to bear much of what we are given to see.
But some times in life the real is forced upon us. I suppose this is why Christianity treats hope as one of only three supernatural virtues, presuming that we understand enough to know why it is needed. In this life, as anyone who has ever undergone its tragedies knows, hope is a virtue.
In our technologically advanced, spiritually primitive paganism, hope is the forgotten of the three new preeminent virtues Christianity offered as gifts to the world. Charity is abused to death; talk of love now bores us and is near meaningless from over-use. Faith or belief we think we know, even if we reject it. We think it means a kind of reasonless act of our individual will. A planting of our willful flag wherever we choose.
But hope as a kind of core or supreme virtue is almost a mystery. What does that even mean?
We don’t need hope if the arc of history bends our way and progress is inevitable.
Worse, we have hidden the very truths that reveal our need for it so as not to trouble ourselves. Death. Deep institutional corruption. Civilizational collapse. The underlying currents of pain in our particular lives like loneliness, guilt, and other anxieties. Unpleasant fictions, all. Eat, drink, and be merry. Take more pills. “Love.” Have “faith” in what you will. And “hope”—well, there’s no need for wishful thinking. Work hard and study, believe in the dreams our culture gives you, and you will be set free.
And the suicide rate rises.
The difference between hope and the shallow self-help that passes for it (often aping faith in one’s own will rather than hope) is in many ways the difference between life and death—sadness and distraction versus happiness and fulfillment.
Hope is what Christianity gave the world, even if you think it bunk. The European primitives before conversion struggled with just this: a dark vision of a doomed world. The monsters would encircle them eventually, they thought. In the end, the dragon would come and slay them all.
The therapeutic and distractive uses of technology in our time are designed to keep such visions at bay. Some iterative mythos of ekpyrosis would inevitably return except for the fact that our masters today have isolated us, and told us a different lie: like Sisyphus in reverse we must keep entertaining and pleasuring ourselves, over and over, with small delights, alone. This is happiness.
And yet we are not happy.
But we think we should be. There must be something wrong with us! Why doesn’t it work? Why am I not happy? We must climb the hill again!
Our ignorance of the human condition is vast. It is astounding that it is even possible to keep a population so ignorant. But we came to think that we had no need for hope. The problem must be in our procedure or its execution. There must be some external or internal constraint holding us back from happiness. We must further free ourselves. And thus we find ourselves enslaved.
Hope is what truly frees the oppressed, which is why the deepest form of oppression obviates not only the perception of its reasonableness or its possibility but the understanding that we need either cultivate it deep within, or live as dead among the living.
Yet even a name comes from another, just as each of us do. A name is given and received.
Names remind us that identity is not and cannot be wholly self-determined. Even in a world that recklessly seeks total atomistic self-determination, and increasingly lauds even self-mutilation accordingly, the nature of naming remains difficult to thwart. This is why it is now a hate crime to “deadname” those who say they wish to change their sexual biology.
A name is blessed or cursed, loved or hated, and gathers reputation from others. This is why Aristotle says fame or status is not a secure good upon which to base one’s ultimate happiness. A name comes from another.
We do not create ourselves or anything else out of nothing, but remain mere temporary stewards of what we are given, and whatever we finally wrought from what we were given. A name comes from another who recognizes us as something determinate.
We both name and receive names. The first human, Adam, did not create but named the animals, the Old Testament tells us, even as God often changes the names of the prophets. We need space to form ourselves and build human communities, but this does not fully unmake what we are and naturally need to become. We need to discover and receive wisdom beyond ourselves and our own experiences to do so, but this does not mean slavishly repeating old mantras or stale formulas.
The Strength of Broken Dreams
Looking through the mirror, through the glass. Looking through the water, past your own reflection, at living things, darting fast.
This transitional slipstream, in which we see suddenly and much too clearly through the water instead of being lulled to sleep by the familiar, muddying currents of the rhetoric of pre-digital life, will eventually pass. At some point we will no longer behold our own reflection mirrored on the increasingly digital surface, as all the old policies and outdated ideologies dissolve.
And perhaps, if we are conquered by those who would further control us, we will all float on into false dreams and visions again, but of another, more terrifying kind. But in the present we need the courage to jettison the old and think anew. We need new humbler but more noble dreams, conformed to the real. The best hopes and dreams are more real than the reality of present experience, because they bring what already exists unseen into sight, and what could and should actually be into being.
But fitfully waiting for this to happen is not a strategy or a plan. We can’t dream our way to better dreams.
A new frontier is the only way forward—and out of—what is and what is to come. But it is not clear where and what manner of frontier it could be. A trove of wisdom and achievement, retrieved and repurposed, is necessary for any needed renaissance. But it is not clear where in the past and what manner of wisdom might revitalize us.
As Peter Thiel wrote recently, “a renaissance will require motivational goals,” which means goals that are “both ambitious and achievable.” The goals of the televisual era were either hubristic and unachievable (“world peace”) or too small and hedonistic (“netflixing”). We are increasingly searching for something else now; like it or not, for the foreseeable future we will be compelled to grasp for it—or die trying.
There are certain summer nights when you can stride the earth and feel as if you could reach up and touch the full moon. But to actually get there, one needs to keep one’s wonder at the skies while willfully submitting to the crushing realism of humility. Reach your hands in the sky as you dream and you will experience the futility of attaining the heavens.
To accomplish such a “dream,” like those who actually put the man on the moon, one needs to abandon dreams. One must observe, learn, and act. One must work hard to know—and then overcome—every physical obstacle that stands in one’s way. One must see, in real life, what prevents the dream from being accomplished, and alter it accordingly.
Dreams in the best sense arise from wonder about what truly is, and concerted effort to discover it. This means that a clinical scientism that pretends to know more than it does, and lashes out at and seeks to cover up the great mystery of existence, can be as much of an impediment as distractive dreams to human vitality. This is because scientism itself has become a dream, and separated itself from the totality of human experience accordingly.
We must experience genuine wonder about human life and nature again, not strain within ourselves to dictate like gods.
It may be necessary for those whose dreams are still borrowed from mass culture, to be disrupted and turned away from the streaming images so that they might have dreams of substance, based on who and what they truly are, and who and what truly is outside themselves and beyond the shadows on the walls of the cave. Many need to be rehabilitated and encouraged to dream natural dreams—to be given truer dreams.
But even for those who perhaps have truer dreams already, it may be necessary to periodically sacrifice them upon the altar of our hearts. What if one must routinely give up the callings of your dreams in order to discover your true calling, or even merely glimpse it, reaching for a goal that, like a shade in Homer, Virgil, and Dante, cannot be grasped by the hands of the living? Is this not the fate of all men? The way of all flesh?
We make idols of good things, as well as bad. We make idols of things worth idolizing, in their way. But to grow and develop, to avoid stuntedness and stagnation, one must sometimes break them and enter out into the unknown once more.
There is a season and a sense in which we ought not to encourage or nurture dreams, or urge others to follow them, but rather to give them up. To let them remain illusions only, patches of glimmering sunlight on the earth beneath the trees in summer.
When I am overburdened by clinging to these dreams too long, can I recognize it? Can I free myself of them? Can we each put aside the unfelt weight we carry and dive into the ocean free? Perhaps they will return. Perhaps not. But to put bread out on the waters is to expect it not to return, to expect only the unknown, and to have to search again to know.
This is why our dreams are so hard to give up: they give us something known—something to hang on to—regardless of their realism, regardless of our circumstances. We imagine we might someday carve them into the future—into the rock of reality itself. We enjoy these imaginings, and linger with them, and attempt to chisel them into stone. To put these plans and their corresponding tools down is to begin again, even if they have propelled us forward to wherever the place we actually stand.
We must sometimes let go of what we have been chiseling, and when we do so we discover where we truly are again, and eventually resume traveling, moving, seeking.
What if, then, to offer up our dreams is not weakness but strength? What if it was silly to think one could hold on absolutely, could conclusively determine and dictate one’s dreams to the world?
To weather broken dreams is to pass through a portal into a vast reality beyond the constraints of your former world, which was likely a sort of constructed idol—an idolatrous landscape or constructed reality, meant to serve virtual goals. If, that is, one can survive the passing through—if your broken dreams don’t break you.
If our dreams become leverage against us for fear of losing them, they may have become idols. You must smash your idols to be free of fear. You must mentally work through killing your Isaacs. Kill your darlings. Even the most noble ones. Neither the world nor God owes any of us our dreams made real.
The American Dream is dead, but America still lives. If it is to live on, we must let the past die, look to our present, and habitually act to confront and determine it. We must not look to the past for dreams, but for the wisdom to perceive and act in the present. We must clear and build more humble paths towards higher ground. It is only then that we can begin to dream naturally again.
When reality has already broken your dreams, holding onto them will only accelerate your own self-destruction.
We are born naked, and we die so—with nothing that is ours except what we formed inside ourselves. But it may be that if we can sacrifice our dreams, what we are inside cannot be broken.
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For those of you who are unaware, “The Sopranos” is a classic American television series. It’s a show about many things, family, business, and relationships. I don’t like when people refer to the show, a show about the Mafia. For me, it’s a show about family. A family who, through generations, happen to be apart of the Italian-American Mafia.
There are two series that (I believe) are excellent in regards to life, business and family. The first is “The Sopranos”, and the second is “Breaking Bad”.
“The Sopranos” has literally redefined television as we know it. It has broken all rules, and set new standards for television excellence. Everything is flawless, the writing, directing, and for me, most of all, the acting.
Watching this show you’ll find yourself realizing that these characters are NOT real. The acting tricks you into thinking there is a real Tony Soprano, or any character. This show is also very versatile. Some people don’t watch the show because it’s violent, it’s not all about the violence, it’s about business, family, and many deeper things that all depend on what you, as a fan see.
In this post, I will like to emphasize the connections and lessons that one can learn about the world of business from that show. As they are particularly memorable and substantive.
On Opportunities;
In the show episode “Down Neck”, Tony Soprano starts to remember his childhood. He remembers when he first discovered that his father was part of the mafia, and he remembers how his parents interacted with each other.
Tony’s family told him that his dad was “in Montana being a cowboy” when he was in jail. Sometimes you just have to laugh and cry at the same time, you know?
In the first season episode, Tony remembers a fight that his father had with his narcissistic mother. The fight was an argument between his mother and his father. You see, his father had a “ground floor” opportunity to move to Reno and set up Mafia operations there with a long-time associate.
His mother, always negative and demanding, refused to let him go. She carried on so. She was relentlessly negative and even threatened to take the children and flee if he left.
Eventually she won.
It’s discovered later that were his father to listen to himself and not take the counsel from his narcissistic wife, that the entire family would be billionaires now.
Tony Soprano’s father and uncle “Junior”.
This is a scene that has played out countless times throughout history. It is one where the father; a “breadwinner” for the family wants to seize an opportunity, but his partner refuses.
It’s a case, some might argue, that a “bird in the hand, is better than two in the bush”.
But, is it actually true?
Is it true in every event, all the time?
Tony Soprano as a young boy watching his father.
What is different is that when opportunities present themselves to the family “breadwinner” it is of a different form that a mere “pipe dream“. For it involves the labor and reward structure for the person who has the idea.
The difference here is that it’s not just an idea, and not just a dream. It’s a business opportunity that involves work alongside people that you know, and (perhaps) trust.
Look, if you have a dream, it’s up to you to follow it.
If you have a dream, you must follow it. Not wait for the approval of others.
Do not be held back by others, especially those you love and care for. Your selection of life partner (husband or wife) will have the biggest impact on your overall satisfaction in life. It will be more influential than anything else.
Look, if you have a dream, it’s up to you to follow it. Do not be held back by others, especially those you love and care for.
Speaking about relationships…
On client relationships:
"When you're bleeding a guy, you don't squeeze him dry right away. Contrarily, you let him do his bidding, suavely. So you can bleed him next week and the week after, at minimum."
Let’s look at a tale of two designers.
One designer (Mr. Bob) was determined to maximize the profit of every project he undertook. Now this isn’t at all easy. He had to haggle over each and every charge and task into great detail and often was involved in seemingly endless arguments. He nick-picked every cent, and argued every clause.
You don’t want to bleed a guy out all at once. You need to handle him suavely.
This quest was accompanied by massive arguments with clients, and yes the occasional lawsuits that would manifest from time to time.
On the other hand, (Mr. John) is a completely different designer with a completely different temperament.
Instead of fighting “tooth and nail” over every single point and issue, he would do the opposite. He tended to concede every (more or less) reasonable point to his clients. Of course, he would end up making less on each job. In fact, he would sometimes even lose money from time to time.
Which one never had repeat business? Which one worked with the same clients for decades?
Take a guess.
Do not fight over every last concession. Build a partnership of mutual respect, and bleed him slowly on your terms.
Of course, clients don’t want to be bled, but they do appreciate a little suaveness.
James Gandolfini is mesmerizing as Tony Soprano, a lynchpin in the Italian Mafia. However, instead of seeing Tony as just a one-dimensional thug, we see that he has a life outside of his criminal activities, and that’s what makes this show different from it’s competition. It’s a different side to the story of criminals, that they have normal lives when not breaking the law.
On creative road-blocks:
"My advice? Put that thing down awhile, we go get our joints copped, and tomorrow the words'll come blowing out your ass."
Paulie’s advice to frustrated amateur screenwriter Christopher is classic. It is pretty much exactly the same as every book on creativity ever written.
Sometimes you all just need to have your joints copped, and enjoy yourself.
If you’re struggling with a problem, put it aside and inspiration will come when you’re not expecting it.
While it may not be possible to follow Paulie’s prescription to the letter… heh heh … the idea that you need to reset your brain is always good strong advice.
Sometimes you all just need to have your joints copped, and enjoy yourself.
The show is mainly about Anthony “Tony” Soprano and his life as a father, husband and leader of a mob in the 21st century. The show is (as far as I know) realistic, compared to many other mafia shows and movies I have seen. The actors fit like a glove to their parts. This show made me realize how good many of these actors are in other shows and movies. This show has it all; humor, action, drama, good music, good actors, good “behind the camera” people and a good plot. The show displays all sides of the mob business; “business”, private life, the cops/FBI point of view, the victims side of the story and much more.
On the creative professions:
"Event planning? It's gay, isn't it?"
On The Sopranos, and within that world of Dons and “Hit Men”, interest in certain things, including but not limited to event planning, fashion design, literature, and certain psychological theories, are considered awful effeminacy.
A similar macho attitude often obtains in corporate boardrooms when it comes to design, and other creative professions.
A lot of executive decision makers are comfortable with spreadsheets. Show them colors and shapes, on the other hand, and you can see the panic in their eyes.
When dealing with people of different interests and backgrounds, you need to understand that not everyone views things from the same point of view. Part of being a success is making these other fellows comfortable with their “softer” sides.
You need to deal with people on THEIR terms.
While the show has often been criticized for the negative stereotype of Italian-Americans as mafiosi, and to an extent this is undeniable, I can see so many positives from the show. The portrayal of strong family values, friendships, love and compassion; could this be present in a coarse television show about gangsters? Yes. Furthermore, other burning issues are discussed such as terrorism, social inequality and injustice, homosexuality, drugs etc. This is no shallow, dull show about tough guys and violence. It has so much more. Many of the issues we see on the show are very real.
On professional behavior:
"You don't think. You disrespect this place. That's the reason why you were passed the fuck over."
There is a reason for corporate dress, behavior and career advice. It is a tool that separates the janitor and street garbage man from the corporate division head, and the board-room .
To fully appreciate this difference not the level of respect that the most successful people in a company place on behavior and relationships. Those that mast that behavior end up mastering that environment.
Corporate dress, behavior and career advice are tools that separates the janitor and street garbage man from the corporate division head, and the board-room .
Corporate dress, behavior and career advice are tools that separates the janitor and street garbage man from the corporate division head, and the board-room .
On appropriation:
"Fuckin' expresso, cappucino. We invented this shit. And all these other cocksuckers are gettin' rich off us."
"Oh, again with the rape of the culture."
By his own admission, Howard Schultz was inspired by the coffee houses of Venice and Milan when he created his own little version in Seattle.
This image is just some people having a meal together right? Yet the context, and the situation, along with the understated currents running through the series creates a masterfully powerful image.
And some people think that the Flintstones are just the Honeymooners except set in the Stone Age.
Imitation, influence, and iteration are crucial to design development. The only requirement is that the goal is transformation, not replication.
The Sopranos really approaches the bloodthirst of the Gods, their cruelty, their indifference to mere mortals…and their so, so human traits mixed in with their almost unbearable inhumanity. But don’t forget they sometimes show great wisdom and kindness too. The Gods and the Sopranos mingle with us mere mortals, but we say a little prayer of thanks when they pass us by. They know things we don’t.
Do not try to replicate. Try to transform.
On the unintended consequences of technology:
"It sounds to me like Anthony Jr. may have stumbled onto existentialism."
"Fucking internet."
Okay, advanced technology may have introduced the idea of a godless universe to the Soprano household. Many American software engineers, however, believe that advanced technology is our best proof that God exists — and that He lives in Cupertino, California.
Sure.
What ever you say.
It’s just “a guy” arguing around some cardboard boxes. Right? The proper use of technology AT ALL LEVELS can create a unique and powerful venue for other purposes. You need to be able to master your craft and do so carefully.
Technology is a double-edged sword. Use it carefully.
On commitment:
"I came home one day, shot her four times. Twice in the head. Killed her aunt, too. I didn't know she was there. And the mailman. At that point, I had to fully commit."
If you’re going to make something big, make it really big. If you’re going to make it simple, make it really simple.
Or really small, or really fancy.
Any thing worth doing is worth doing well.
If you’re going after a project, if you’re trying to win a competition, if you’re serious about getting the job done, don’t bother unless you’re willing to fully commit.
On bacon and eggs;
The Chicken was involved, but the pig was committed.
Any thing worth doing is worth doing well.
On aesthetics:
"Not in the face, okay? You give me that? Huh? Keep my eyes?"
Designers like to think that it’s not about how it looks. It’s about how it works, or how it communicates, or how it changes the world. All true, except it’s also about how it looks.
Have some dignity even through the worst of life.
The artifacts we make are the Trojan Horses that deliver our ideas to an unsuspecting public. Making them look beautiful — or engaging, or funny, or provocative — is anything but a superficial exercise.
We all get whacked now and then. Just make sure you get to keep your eyes.
Have some dignity even through the worst of life.
On pizza
Take that shit outside! Don't ever disrespect the pizza parlor.
-Christopher Moltosanti, after getting his button in season 3
What does pizza have to do with design? What doesn’t pizza have to do with design.
Never forget the importance of pizza.
Never forget the importance of pizza.
Keeping our creative focus:
"I'm not a cat! I don't shit in a box!"
Uncle Junior’s response to using a bedpan. Sometimes we got to breakout of what’s expected of us and maintain some dignity.
If anyone here thinks the Sopranos is just about murder and the mafia then it skimmed over your head completely.
The pleasure of watching this show is that the barrier of the TV screen protects us. I think the writers are constantly reminding us of the moral dimension involved. The Sopranos is at the bottom of it, deeply moral. It’s about actions, and codes. If you get hung up on the violence, you probably had better watch something else and leave it at that. Go drink some Kool Aid and chill.
On choice:
"There's an old Italian saying: you f--k up once, you lose two teeth."
Adriana in the clutches of the FBI and this time they get very serious after she is filmed disposing evidence of a crime.
She admits that Matoush the drug dealer killed someone in her office and she cleaned up after the fact even though the killing had nothing to do with her.
The FBI tell her that unless she can get Christopher to flip, she will be arrested and charged.
She tells Chris what’s happened and he tells her they’re both dead and have no way out of the predicament she’s put them in…
"That's a bad decision."
It’s gone. Black. Nothing.
The world of “The Sopranos” was never kind to a rat, even when it was our beloved Adrianna. After revealing to Christopher that she was an informant for the Feds, Adrianna met her demise. Christopher informed Tony, who had Silvio take Adrian for a ride in what may have been the show’s best episode – “Long Term Parking.”
When does Adriana know she’s going to die?
Is it when Silvio drags her out of the car, pulling her into the isolated woods, so she can crawl away from him pitifully? Is it when he pulls over, not at the hospital, but in the middle of nowhere?
Is it on the car ride over there, when she hears him talking about how resilient Christopher is—and must realize on some level that he’s talking about how Christopher will be in the wake of her death, not after the foiled suicide attempt that was the excuse to get her in the car?
“Heartbreaking” is the word that kept popping up in online forums in the days after this episode aired. Probably no Sopranos episode pulled at the heartstrings like “Long Term Parking” did.
I remember two or three weeks after Season 5 ended, I caught myself moping around the house, feeling kinda down. This in itself was not very surprising—I always went through a period of withdrawal after a season wrapped up. But I felt particularly raw that summer of 2004—and then I realized what it was:
I was still bummed out over the death of Adriana LaCerva.
I’m not normally prone to overly emotional responses to the deaths of fictional characters. So why was I so downcast over the demise of this big-haired Jersey girl? The answer: because David Chase wanted me to be.
“Long Term Parking” is a powerful, resonating hour in and of itself, but much of its resonance also comes from its connections to long-running threads, associations and images from over the course of the series. Some of the bells that ring in this hour are set off by mallets that began their swing years ago. Almost everything in this episode—every twist, every scene, every line of dialogue—is anchored to something that we’ve viewed or heard or understood in previous episodes.
If we are shaken by “Long Term Parking,” it is because the hour taps so deeply into our experience of being embedded in SopranoWorld over the last 5 seasons.
- Long Term Parking (5.12)
Is it when Tony first calls her and tells her Sil is on his way to take her to the hospital? Is it when Christopher gets up and says he needs to clear his head before they make any big moves? Or is it when the FBI tells her it’s time to wear a wire or get Christopher to turn—or go to jail?
Me, I think Adriana realizes what’s happening on that car ride to the woods.
Adriana realizes what’s happening on that car ride to the woods.
You see Drea de Matteo’s face, and there’s a moment where her tears switch over from tears for Christopher to tears for herself, for the life she’s never going to get to lead (even if that life might have involved getting fat and moon-faced or watching Christopher grow a horrifying mullet and mostly ignore their kids as they race through a gas station parking lot).
I suspect that she knew all along this was one possible way this car trip would end.
The one-way car trip.
I expect that she knew fairly soon into it that option B—the one ending in her death—was a larger possibility than she wanted to admit. But there’s this moment of perfect, crystalline acting, when you can see the switch flip, and you can see she knows what’s about to happen.
It would be a mistake to classify Adriana as innocent—she’s clearly culpable in the various bad things she’s done over the years, and she knows more than she lets on to the FBI.
Adriana realizes what’s happening on that car ride to the woods.
But she’s an innocent, someone who’s just a little bit naïve and lacks the sense of, say, Meadow, who ostensibly knows enough to flee this life. This life is all Adriana has ever known, and it’s all she will ever know, and even as she paints a vision for Christopher of the life they’ll lead together away from New Jersey, it seems like some part of her doesn’t really believe it, even as the rest of her is giving the hard sell.
So that leaves Adriana, in a car, somewhere on the highway in the wooded landscapes of New Jersey.
Adriana’s last moments in the words of New Jersey as the leaves fall all around them.
The leaves are falling, and a song about California’s on the radio, and she’s imagining a point where she simply skipped town, ditched the two warring factions in her life that almost never saw her as a human being.
(The mobsters, ultimately, treat her more warmly than the FBI does, on average.)
She looks out the window, and she thinks back on everything that led to this point, all of the moments in her life that got her into this car, with the man rambling endlessly about how her fiancé is going to bounce back.
And she knows.
And it all blows away like ashes.
Mistakes, in business, can be fatal.
I hope that you enjoyed this post. I have others in my Happiness Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
I sometimes read comments from younger women that I’m “so lucky” to be a man. Fuck that! No one ever tells that nonsense to my face. They’d die of shock seeing my resultant expression. Probably piss their trousers too.
Men and women are different, and different is great!
But here, listen up! If you all think that you would love to have some of those “advantages” of being a man, go the fuck ahead. Get some transgender surgery and walk the walk. Stop moaning and groaning about your inadequacies.
Being a man is no picnic.
Tony Soprano is the typical American male. He comes with all the good and the bad. He is typical.
There’s a reason why, in the past, men would have their own “man caves”, male-only clubs, and retreats. And it’s time for you all to throw out all that neo-liberal progressive transgender neural nonsense out the window. It’s all a big fucking lie.
Me? I think it’s somewhere in between, albeit leaning a bit towards women, with both genders having advantages and disadvantages.
Gandolfini makes Tony Soprano an Everyman, which is no easy task. Edie Falco (Oz) plays Tony’s wife, Carmela, with a winning mix of family loyalty and a fondness for the suburban lifestyle. Nancy Marchand (Lou Grant) is outstanding as Livia Soprano, Tony’s infuriating mother, and the subject of his unacknowledged love-hate relationship.
However, we incessantly hear from women about the disadvantages of being their gender, but the reverse is rarer. You don’t hear a lot of men telling women what they’d hate about being a man.
The biggest thing I can think of is the weight of expectations. If you are unable to live up to the expectations placed upon you, your life can become very empty, barren and lonely.
Be emotionally strong; be physically strong. Show no weakness.
Be a man; make the first move, but not too assertively.
Plan, make a career; make good decisions…. all with practically zero training or support from society at large. If you’re lucky, you had a good dad. If not…
Self beautification will not be appreciated and may in some cases cost you social status.
It’s like this…
No compliments from anyone, like maybe twice a year tops.
Any show of emotion outside of a romantic relationship is only going to grant you isolation from your peers.
In the event of an emergency your life is worth less than the women and children near you. Deal with it. “You’re a man.”
Being the sole income provider for a family and missing out 40+ hours a week on your child’s life is seen as a privilege.
If a man and a woman have the same problem, society will help the woman, but will expect the man to find a solution on his own.
If a man and a woman have the same problem, society will help the woman and expect the man to find a solution on his own
You’re more invisible. Most men are not noticed. We operate in the background, quietly keeping the fires warm, and the machines working.
In general, people just won’t care about you most of the time.
Men are more disposable. If you lose your ability to make money no one will give a damn about you.
Mistakes aren’t forgiven. Name one man who has been forgiven for his mistakes.
Emotional weakness becomes a cardinal sin, and a career limiting move.
Men (not me but friends I know) get raked over the coals, primary custody of a child is always given to the mother (you have to prove she is a monster just to have primary custody).
Men are expected to “make the first move on a woman”.
A woman can hit herself in the head with a stick and all she has to do is say “he did it” and Boom… you did it.
My dad used to say, men at one time could support a family and children and more and more it is less and less true, but today it is the expected gold standard.
Any and all problems voiced will be met with derision and mockery, and probably just turned back onto you, no matter how out of your control they are “LOL. man up stop bitching”.
Vast majority of your interactions with opposite sex have to be initiated and carried by you.
Nobody will pay you compliments or make you feel good about how you look, much more likely to have people critique what you are wearing, your weight, how you act, dress, style your hair, and your selection of shoes…
People aren’t as nice in general as you thought they are.
Tony Soprano is the typical American male. He comes with all the good and the bad. He is typical. The Sopranos (HBO) season 1 Winter 1999 Shown: Michael Imperioli (as Christopher Moltisanti), James Gandolfini (as Tony Soprano), Steve Van Zandt (as Silvio Dante)
Being expected to endure anything from the opposite sex, even stretching as far as assault and rape .
Simplest comparison I could come up with to answer the question, is with another question. Why do so many men pay cam girls? There’s free porn everywhere on the net, but what they are actually getting is the belief, even for a moment, that they are worth those girls attention.
You will be told how to dress, how to cut your hair, how to behave, and how to act by EVERYONE. Your only refuge from this onslaught will be in your home.
Conclusion
Women can literally sit in their underwear and have money thrown at them because men are so desperate for some kind words, a little bit of attention, and a desire to feel needed and important.
Being a man is not easy.
Men are not permitted to have emotions or to show them. If they do, their work and career is flat-lined and with it, all respect from both males and females of all ages. The most successful men are stoic and aloof. It’s not something that men want to do. It’s something that they have to do.
That’s why women would hate being a man. Easy mode would be turned off.
So, if you are a woman, and think that men have it so easy, then be my guest. Make the change. Take the hormones and have the surgery. Go transgender. Just kiss the ability to emote away. It’s a life without overt emotional display. Do you think that you can handle it?
I hope that you enjoyed this post. I have others, very similar to in on a wide selection of topics in my Happiness Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
We have gotten so used to the way that things are, we painstakingly believe that they have always been this way. We think that taxes, regulation and dual-working families are the norm. They are not. They are progressive inventions. The life we live today is the utopia that President Wilson forged back in 1913.
Here, we take a look at what life was like before the progressive improvements in American Society.
Detroit’s Belle Isle back in 1905. Source: Coleman Family
Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, circa 1905. “Lawn tennis courts, Pocono Mountain House.” 8×10 inch glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
When
writing historical things, I try to include perspective from people who
actually lived through the events. And for money issues in the US, I’m
able to do that back to about 1905.
So, do you think life was nasty, brutish, and short in 1905? That
there were poor and starving people falling dead on every street corner?
Hardly.
1905. “Lackawanna Railway station, Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania.” 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
The Wright brothers
were flying for 30 minutes at a crack; Einstein was upgrading the laws
of physics; telephones and electric lights were being installed all
across America; Henry Ford was getting the final pieces in place for his
moving assembly line and Model T; radio was being developed; art was flourishing; and the world was more or less at peace.
American homes in 1905.
Sure, we have far more tech and better medicine now, but mostly
because the people of earlier times (like the 1905 era) gifted it to us.
People in 1905 lived in heated homes, refrigerated their food, had access to professional physicians, traveled the world
(mostly on trains and ships), read daily newspapers (there were many
more of them in those days), watched movies, and ate just about the same
foods we eat.
Chicago circa 1906. “Lake Shore Drive, Jackson Park.” 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
So, was it really that bad a time?
No, it wasn’t. In fact, it was better in important ways.
Money Issues in the US: The Facts Don’t Lie
Consider this:
The working person of 1905 kept his or her money. They ended up saving somewhere between a quarter and a half of everything they made – after living expenses.
Portland, Maine, circa 1905. “Congress Square Hotel, Congress Street and Forest Avenue.” 8×10 inch glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
It’s hard to be completely precise when reconstructing the budgets of
average people in 1905 (records are hard to find), but we do have
enough for a good, close guess.
Here’s how finance worked for a working family man of 1905:
Life in the center of a medium sized town in 1905.
If you’re thinking that I’m taking liberties with these numbers, let
me assure you that I’m not – I’m being conservative. For example:
The income figure should probably be higher. I’ve found figures of well over $800 for construction workers.
As for expenses, I rounded up from a New York Times article, dated 29 September, 1907. It specified $325 per year.
Added to that is the fact that many people grew their own food during that time, which would skew the figures further.
As noted initially, I compared these numbers with stories I heard
from relatives who lived through the time. My uncle Dave, for example,
used to tell me how he got a job paying $390 per year sweeping floors as
an unskilled immigrant (who spoke almost no English) in 1903.
New York, 1904. “A flower vender’s Easter display, Union Square.” 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.
The next time you drive through an old part of town and see the grand old houses, remember that people were able to build and buy them because their paychecks weren’t stripped bare.
There were no income taxes in 1905, no sales taxes, no state taxes, and not much in the way of property taxes.
Circa 1905. “Saranac Lake central station, Adirondacks, N.Y.” With a locomotive of the Delaware & Hudson Railway. 8×10 inch glass negative
There was also no such thing as a military-industrial complex in those days, and – miracle of miracles – the rest of the world survived!
And Now…
Today, the situation is much, much different. The average working family pays about half their income in combined taxes:
income taxes (to the state and the Feds), payroll taxes, property
taxes, gas taxes, utility bill taxes, sales tax, local taxes, and on and
on.
Philadelphia circa 1904. “City Hall clock tower from South Broad Street.” 8×10 inch glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.
So, figuring an average income of just over $50,000 (the 2011
figure). And combined taxes of about $25,000, the average American
family is left to pay bills like these:
Mortgage 11,000 Car payments 6,000 Gas, repairs, etc. 2,500 Property taxes 2,500 Food 3,000 Total $25,000
That leaves people zeroed-out. And again, I’m being conservative, and I haven’t included a number of smaller expenses.
The Mississippi River circa 1905. “Union Depot and steamboat landing at foot of Jackson Street, St. Paul, Minnesota.” Starring the sidewheeler Hiawatha. 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.
Great Grandpa Did It, So Why Not Us?
Your great grandfathers faced very few of the taxes that we face.
(The government survived on tariffs.) There was no social security
either, and – believe it or not – the streets were never full of
starving old people. Families were able to take care of their own – it’s not that hard when you’re saving half of your income!
Circa 1905. “St. John Street, Quebec.” Rue Saint-Jean at Côte du Palais in Quebec City, home to the drugstores of P. Mathie and J.E. Livernois. 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.
We have forgotten that it was once possible for an average person to accumulate money. The truth is that productive people should be comfortable. Well-off, as they used to say.
So, why can’t we party like it’s 1905?
New York circa 1903. “Looking up Broadway from City Hall.” With a view of the National Shoe & Leather Bank, and a roving vendor of DESKS.
So, why can’t we party like it’s 1905?
…
…
So why NOT?
…
You might want to think about that question.
May 1910. “Noon hour at Obear-Nestor Glass Co., East St. Louis, Illinois. Names of the smallest boys are: Walter Kohler, 981 N. 18th Street; Walter Riley, 918 N. 17th Street; Will Convery, 1828 Natalie Avenue; Clifford Matheny, 1927 Summit Avenue. All employed at the glassworks.” Photo by Lewis Hine.
Thank you for reading this masterfully written piece. If you loved the photos, you can check out a ton-load of them on SHORPY. You can go to SHORPY HERE.
Circa 1907. “Northampton, Massachusetts — Elm Street.” 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
Meme
And here’s a meme that you can use to spread the message…
If you enjoyed this post, perhaps you might want to check out some of my other posts in my Happiness Index, here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
It’s nice to think that we are “modern”, “enlightened”, “progressive’ and “forward thinking”. But, unfortunately that is a big lie. Humans, at best, can only sustain a calm period of coexistence for a handful of decades. No longer. The fact and the truth is that blood was spilled ruthlessly for most of human history.
Routinely.
If you are living in the belief that wars will forever be isolated from you, then buckle up. It can hit with surprising suddenness and completely alter the landscape of your reality forever.
It’s the historical norm.
Will Rogers quote.
Prepare yourself for a painful recap of the most savage wars that ever took place. Fought over religion, political supremacy, or conquest, the conflicts of the past killed tens of millions and left the land we live today blood-soaked.
War can occur anywhere, at any time, and affect anyone. No one is immune.
1. French Wars of Religion – 3 million
Expert Tip: Wars over ideology can be very fierce, bloody and dangerous.
It was an awful time to believe in God.
A death toll of 3 million is a good introduction, especially because we will first explore a war erupting solely because some overzealous folks couldn’t agree to what religion is better.
My God is better!
No! You are wrong. My God is better!
Hell with you and what you think! You need to die!!!!
The French Wars of Religion is an umbrella term for the many frictions that opposed the Catholics (and the Huguenots (Reformed Protestants)). Once started, everyone wanted in on it. They were fighting each other over interpretations of Biblical passages, for goodness sake!
He said this!
But, he meant that!
Die! Heathen scum!
Indeed, once it started there was no stopping it. It moved on and took on “legs of it’s own”. Lordy! Carried out throughout the 16th century, it aroused other European powers into picking sides.
Ugh!
The north of Hesse, also known as Hesse-Cassel, became reformed, or Calvinist in 1605, while Hesse-Darmstadt in the south became Lutheran. Both Hesse and Brandebourg, which was also reformed, had suffered greatly during the Thirty Years War and for this reason the Huguenot refugees were made welcome.
I know it’s confusing. Here’s the official take…
Huguenots were a religious group of French Protestants. Huguenots were French Protestants who held to the Reformed, or Calvinist, tradition of Protestantism.
The term has its origin in early-16th-century France.
It was frequently used in reference to those of the Reformed Church of France from the time of the Protestant Reformation. By contrast, the Protestant populations of eastern France, in Alsace, Moselle, and Montbéliard were mainly German Lutherans.
- Wikipedia
Women and children are being tortured by soldiers in front of a statue of Louis XIV. A Protestant minister is in a basket because he refused to worship the Host. . Persecution of the Huguenots according to Romeyn de Hooghe
And yet another opinion…
The French Wars of Religion were a prolonged period of war and popular unrest between Catholics and Huguenots (Reformed/Calvinist Protestants) in the Kingdom of France between 1562 and 1598. It is estimated that three million people perished in this period from violence, famine, or disease in what is considered the second deadliest religious war in European history (surpassed only by the Thirty Years' War, which took eight million lives).
- French Wars of Religion - Wikipedia
What happened was scandalous mostly because the Catholic Church considered the atrocities a sign a divine retribution.
Yeah...
God approves of this war. He told me.
Massacre of Vassy .On March 1, 1562, 300 Huguenots holding religious services in a barn outside the town wall of Vassy, France, were attacked by troops under the command of Francis, Duke of Guise. More than 60 Huguenots were killed and over 100 wounded during the Massacre of Vassy. Francis claimed he did not order an attack but was instead retaliating against stones being thrown at his troops.
And still yet another explanation…
The massacre of Huguenots at Vassy in 1562 began the Wars of Religion between the Catholics under the leadership of the Duke of Guise and the Huguenots under the leadership of Prince de Conde and the King of Navarre. The war was interrupted briefly, but flared up again after the infamous...
- Huguenot Wars - World History
I know.
I know, I’ve given three instances of explanation, and still I haven’t figured it all out. It’s nuts. It’s crazy. It’s insane.
We look back at this time and shake our heads. But, you know…
… it was a different time and place.
The above painting depicts the most “memorable” event of the French Wars of Religion – the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Huguenots were slaughtered in the tens of thousands in a feast of savagery that lasted several weeks.
You will be surprised to know the changed little since then. Aside from technology advances and the ability to manipulate large groups of people by ideology…
… nothing has changed.
Expert Tip: We are not more enlightened today compared to the past.
The French Wars of Religion – the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.
Yeah, yeah… I know. It’s really difficult to get a feel for what was going on at that time. Woodcuts cannot compare to colorful photos and dramatic images. Their clothes are odd and their customs are strange. It’s difficult to imagine. I mean … men wore tights with cod pieces for Pete’s sake!
Well… anyways…
So let’s move forward to something more recent, then.
2. Great African War – 3.5 million
Africa. Most Americans don’t give a flying fudge about it. The Great African War in all it’s incarnations happened under the Clinton and Bush years. No one cared.
Yet…
…millions died in the hot steamy jungles of the Congo. They fought over… well, it’s not precisely known exactly what they fought about…
…power, money, drugs, sex…
… gold, fun, religion…
… magic, God, spirits, voodoo…
…and potatoes.
The Second Congo War was so bloody and violent that people started calling it the “Great African War.”
Explaining the loose ends of African politics in under two paragraphs is a daunting task…
A deadly cocktail of inter-ethnic violence, genocide, and warring factions turned the Democratic Republic of Congo into a hellish tropical nightmarish steamy land of never ending suffering and misery.
Who’s to blame?
The fall of the former colonial empires left Africa with so many wounds the crystallization of the new nations was hastened and often uninspired…
Everyone was fighting everyone else for so many, many, many reasons. It’s difficult to sort it all out. It was a bloody free for all of torture, misery, and death.
Almost all neighboring states sent troops to support one side or the other for the duration of the conflict (1998 – 2002).
The Congo conflict showed once more the awful consequences of
bringing a war to poor communities. The hundreds of thousands that died
in combat were soon joined by the millions that perished through disease
and starvation.
Do you know what the worst part is?
Even after a peace treaty had been signed, war is still smoldering, claiming lives on such a constant basis that it is no longer news.
Sort of like those shootings in Chicago…
Or the news that Trump is gonna be impeached any day now…
The Congo conflict showed once more the awful consequences of bringing a war to poor communities. The hundreds of thousands that died in combat were soon joined by the millions that perished through disease and starvation.
Expert Tip: Some people fight first and then look for an excuse later on.
Check out the war that almost saw France conquer Europe.
3. Napoleonic Wars – 4.5 million
For those of you who are unaware, after the French Revolution…
…when the millions of poor and middle class overthrew the French oligarch aristocrats…
… they didn’t know how to govern.
They were incompetent. So in order to control the people (then, collective known as the “rabble”) they started to engage in war.
Wars, you see, are a great distraction away from the domestic problems at home.
The Battle of Aspern-Essling was fought May 21-22, 1809, and was part of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815).
From the chaos of the French Revolution, came military leaders. And, one military ruler emerged with the ambition of leading France to greatness.
Napoleon Bonaparte was such a brilliant military tactician that he convinced his fellow countrymen to crown him emperor. Consider the fact that French did that just ten years since they guillotined their last king.
Yeah…
Pure genus!
— Not. —
Rule by popular opinion is idiotic. It get’s people killed.
America! Listen up and learn something why don’t ya?
Expert Tip: Rule by manipulated mob is called “democracy”. It only favors the wealthy oligarchy.
The Napoleonic Wars was probably the first time a European power attempted continental hegemony. Between 1803 and 1815, it became sort of a cliché to hear the news of Napoleon’s army won another decisive battle against various coalitions of Austrian, Prussian, and Russian forces.
The French were on a winning streak.
Nothing could stop them.
So…
They kept on pushing. They kept on prodding. They keep on… they were so confident that they would forever keep on winning.
Expert Tip: Learn to stop when you are ahead.
The formidable French forces aligned and ready for battle.
Like I said… America listen up!
Napoleon’s winning strike came to an end with him foolishly attacking Russia during the winter.
I mean… what were they thinking?
Expert Tip: Do not declare war on Asia. They always win.
The battle of Borodino and the long retreat to France are amongst the bloodiest episodes of the Napoleonic Wars.
After attacking Russia, the French military was devastated. Less than 10% survived and made it back home.
It’s easy to see the Napoleonic Wars as a rehearsal, one hundred years before the “Great War” (World War I) would plunge Europe back into darkness. More than 4.5 million lost their lives, of which a third were French.
That’s what always happens when you follow a charismatic lunatic.
Expert Tip: Do not follow a charismatic lunatic.
4. Reconquista – 7 million
The Iberian Peninsula was the set of a bloody conflict. It was the first major front for Muslims and Christians to slaughter each other.
Christians fought Muslims in the South of Spain and it was horribly tragic.
What we know today as Spain and Portugal might have held Moorish names…
… if it weren’t for the painstakingly way with which the early Christian kingdoms fought the invaders back across the Gibraltar Strait.
And make no mistake, it was bloody.
Expert Tip: Do not live on migration routes.
The kingdoms of Asturias, León, Castile, Navarre, Aragon, and Portugal fought over the course of seven centuries to reconquer what it took the Moors only five years.
The Iberian Peninsula was the set of a bloody conflict. It was the first major front for Muslims and Christians to slaughter each other.
You will be surprised to know that the Reconquista formally ended in
1492, the same year Christopher Columbus went across the pond to
discover the New World. The fall of Granada marked the end of Muslim
claim in Western Europe.
Going back to 732 AD, the Islamic Moors conquered almost all the
entire peninsula and even crossed the Pyrenees to modern day France.
There probably is one alternate reality where Europe gets fully
conquered by armies chanting the name of Allah.
Check out another religious conflict that went too far.
5. Thirty Years’ War – 8 million
The Thirty Years War
... a European war of 1618–48 which broke out between the Catholic Holy Roman emperor and some of his German Protestant states and developed into a struggle for continental hegemony with France, Sweden, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire as the major protagonists. It was ended by the Treaty of Westphalia.
- More about Thirty Years War
The United States has been in Afghanistan for twenty years now. It, like most of the wars of the last seventy or so years, are proxy wars in third world shit-holes.
Third World ShitholeunknownNounreferringtoanyimpoverishedforeigncountryinwhichcrime, graft, andcorruptionaremodusoperandi.
- Urban Dictionary: Third World Shithole
It involves, pretty much, expensive planes dropping expensive munitions on mud and clay huts, while “boots on the ground” act as personal bodyguards for the local rich and powerful so that the “interests” of the American oligarchy are maintained.
Nah. I’m not biased. Eh?
Now, imagine that instead of twenty years fighting uneducated tribesmen, we’ve got a full on military presence fighting war like what we experienced during “D Day” for…
…um… like…
…thirty years.
Wars are never pretty. Americans have never really fought an all-out war. At most we had the American Civil War and the Revolutionary war. But if you lived outside the conflict areas, you pretty much could live your life in peace. Not so during the Thirty Years war. No one, no place, and nothing was safe.
The Thirty Years’ War coined just how messed the political map of the European continent was in the 17th century.
What started as a localized conflict between various Protestant and Catholic states (duh!) evolved into a full-scale conflagration. It was one that ravaged Central Europe and left behind the bulkiest death toll the continent has ever since in such a short time.
Every power had a good pretext to join the Thirty Years’ War.
War is good!
Save the King!
Power to the People!
We are the best! They are the worst scum imaginable!
Kill them all. Rape their women! Kill their babies,all for our King!
By far the most flamboyant intervention was that of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who engaged in one of the most bizarre adventures that took his troops deep into southern Germany.
Thirty Years' War in British English noun a major conflict involving principally Austria , Denmark , France, Holland , the German states , Spain , and Sweden , that devastated central Europe, esp large areas of Germany (1618–48).
- Thirty Years' War definition and meaning | Collins English
Humans can become awfully cruel to each other and atrocities towards others becomes normalized.
The Thirty Years’ War brevetted cruel execution methods like so-called Defenestration. In this “humane” procedure, soldiers threw out the windows the civilians of the captured cities.
The first all-out war that engulfed Europe showed major powers just how “fun” can be to fight on a continental scale. What followed was much worse.
The human condition. In Europe. The most “civilized” place on the planet.
Expert Tip: No place is immune from war or conflict.
Europe was not the only place where people enjoyed slaughtering each other.
6. Chinese Civil War – 8 million
Following in the footsteps of Russia, when they over threw their oligarchy, the poor Chinese peasants tried to do the exact same thing. They set up factions and fought each other on a very bloody and enormous land mass.
Expert Tip: Oligarchies tend to anger the peasants & serfs. This results in war.
Nationalist prisoner captured by the Marxists and paraded before the townspeople before being tortured and killed.
The Chinese Civil War opposed forces loyal to the Republic of China to the army assembled by the Communist Party.
Oligarchy = Nationalist Republic of China.
The fighting poor = Communist Party
What followed was a bewildering war with a temporary and curious anomaly.
Killings were everywhere. Friends killed friends, brothers killed brothers, and no one was safe.
Probably the strangest fact about the conflict was that it took a decade-long hiatus. Between 1936 and 1946, the Nationalists and the Communists formed a United Front that opposed the territorial claims of Imperial Japan.
Once WWII ended, the two enemies were back at each other’s throats.
Gun boat on the river. It was an effective platform for firepower at critical towns and villages.
Mao Zedong (the leader of the Communist Party) rose as a leader during the Great March, a strategic retreat of the Communist forces that would weight decisively in their victory.
The Communists (the rural poor) won, and chased the oligarchy to the island of Taiwan. Which now is the remaining stronghold for the remaining remnants of Chinese “blue blood”.
The Chinese have known thousands of years of conflict in a very up-front and personal way. And when the communists took over, they failed miserably. They did not know how to do anything right, and millions died by starvation, poverty and internal “turf wars”.
Expert Tip: Never allow yourself to be disarmed by progressive Marxists.
Their last conflict was in 1966 when the progressive Marxists lost it completely. They, in turn, were overthrown by a government that embraced a new kind of socialism. It’s socialism with capitalism; or in other words “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.
America should take note.
Expert tip: China is communist in name only.
The Chinese, a nation of merit, has known complete suffering and devastation for centuries. They view war as a terribly personal thing that must be avoided at all costs. However, if it cannot be avoided…
…It must be dealt with quickly and absolutely.
7. Russian Civil War – 9 million
Now, according to American media and history books, there was this pesky “Russian Revolution”. It was a time when the communists overthrew the the Tsar.
What they fail to tell you is that it was like the “French Revolution”. The downtrodden peasants over thrown the ruling oligarchy. Then once the oligarchy was neutered, a group of idealistic Marxists took over. They started killing everyone…
…all in the name of a progressive utopia.
The Russian revolution enabled progressive Marxists to over throw the ruling oligarchy. The rest of the world trembled that it might occur again in their communities.
One century ago, Russia had a hard time deciding its political future. There were many participants. But, all being said and done it was really down to two sides;
The wealthy oligarchy.
The uneducated poor.
The Red Army (the idealistic poor) and the White Army (the defenders of the oligarchy) faced each other in a bloody war. It was a war that claimed millions of lives and kept the country in turmoil for six years.
Everything started once the impoverished people of Russia have had enough with their Tsar and the rest of the ruling oligarchy.
The pageantry of the ruling Russian oligarchy rivaled pre-Napoleonic France. Bet you’se guys never saw these pictures in your American history books, eh?
In just one year (1917), the Russians went through two revolutions.
One toppled the century-old monarchy…
… while the other gave way to the Communist takeover.
You might be surprised to know that Russia’s future was quite uncertain in the early phases of its civil war.
Republicans, pro-monarchists, fascists – all wanted to fill in the power vacuum and exploit the gullible babushkas. Historians are still not sure what made Russia such a fertile ground for Communist Marxist ideology.
Expert Tip: People will accept governance in just about any form as long as it’s not an oligarchy.
I attribute it to being treated like dirt by the wealthy aristocrats.
Although a lot of fighting took place throughout the Russian Civil War, the bulk of the victims is represented by civilians who happened to side with the losers.
Lenin and the gang cleansed society and painted it in blood.
The new Marxists killed their enemies, and if you were lucky, you got to go to a Gulag.
That might answer why the Soviet Union saw little internal political friction throughout its existence. Why? Well, everyone who could possibly… remotely… be a threat was killed.
Expert Tip: Progressive Marxists eventually kill everyone.
Now…
Check out the atrocities committed by a bunch of Spanish soldiers!
8. Spanish Conquest of Peru – 9 million
As late as 1528, the Inca Empire was a cohesive unit, ruled by one dominant ruler, Huayna Capac.
He died, however, and two of his many, many sons, Atahualpa and Huáscar, began to fight over his empire. (Being a King has sexual advantages, don’t you know…)
For four years, a bloody civil war raged over the Empire and in 1532 Atahualpa emerged victoriously.
It was at this precise moment, when the Empire was in ruins, that Pizarro and his men showed up: they were able to defeat the weakened Inca armies and exploit the social rifts that had caused the war in the first place.
The Spanish conquest of Peru is a dark chapter of human history, one that holds the story of the 9 million Incas that perished.
Francisco Pizarro is the man responsible for conquering an entire
empire with only a handful of well-equipped soldiers. The conquistador
put to work superior weapons and a cunning plan.
Expert Tip: Beware of strangers with advanced technology and a love of gold.
In November of 1532, Inca Emperor Atahualpa was captured by the Spanish: he had agreed to meet with them, feeling that they did not pose a threat to his massive army. This was but one of the mistakes the Inca made.
Later, Atahualpa’s generals, fearing for his safety in captivity, did not attack the Spanish while there were still only a few of them in Peru: one general even believed Spanish promises of friendship and let himself be captured.
The soldiers and people of the Inca Empire did not meekly turn over their homeland to the hated invaders. Major Inca generals such as Quisquis and Rumiñahui fought pitched battles against the Spanish and their native allies, notably at the 1534 Battle of Teocajas.
Later, members of the Inca royal family such as Manco Inca and Tupac Amaru led massive uprisings: Manco had 100,000 soldiers in the field at one point. For decades, isolated groups of Spaniards were targeted and attacked. The people of Quito proved particularly fierce, fighting the Spanish every step of the way to their city, which they burned to the ground when it became apparent that the Spanish were certain to capture it.
The drawing below shows the climax of the Spanish blitzkrieg against the Incas. Pizarro ambushes emperor Atahualpa, who is captured and executed.
The climax of the Spanish blitzkrieg against the Incas. Pizarro ambushes emperor Atahualpa, who is captured and executed.
Although the Incas rebelled multiple times against the foreign
invaders, there was little they could do regarding fighting the
infectious diseases the Europeans brought with them. The Spanish
conquest of the Inca Empire formally ended in 1572.
Although many of the native people fought back fiercely, others allied themselves with the Spanish. The Inca were not universally loved by the neighboring tribes they had subjugated over the centuries, and vassal tribes such as the Cañari hated the Inca so much that they allied themselves with the Spanish: by the time they realized that the Spanish were an even bigger threat it was too late. Members of the Inca royal family practically fell over one another to gain the favor of the Spanish, who put a series of puppet rulers on the throne. The Spanish also co-opted a servant class called the yanaconas: the yanaconas attached themselves to the Spaniards and were valuable informants.
The Inca had skilled generals, veteran soldiers and massive armies numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands. The Spanish were greatly outnumbered, but their horses, armor, and weapons gave them an advantage that proved too great for their enemies to overcome. There were no horses in South America until Europeans brought them: native warriors were terrified of them and at first, the natives had no tactics to counter a disciplined cavalry charge. In battle, a skilled Spanish horseman could cut down dozens of native warriors. Spanish armor and helmets, made of steel, made their wearers practically invulnerable and fine steel swords could cut through any armor the natives could put together.
By that time, the second most advanced civilization of the New World booked a one-way ticket into oblivion.
Pizarro ambushes emperor Atahualpa, who is captured and executed.
The next page reveals another bloody conflict that shocked the medieval world.
9. Conquests of Tamerlane – 17 million
Here we have a very powerful and ruthless man. His name was Tamerlane, and he was the most powerful general under Genghis Khan.
Initially, Greater Mongol State was the name of the Mongol Empire. In the world’s history, Mongol Empire was the only empire that managed to take over and rule a number of countries and territories. But before it happened, war was declared. It happened from the year 1207-1472.
When I rise, the world shall tremble!
Take a good look at Tamerlane, the ruthless ruler responsible for killing 5% of the world population throughout the years he campaigned.
Timur, historically known as Tamerlane (1336 - 1405), was a Turco-Mongol conqueror and the founder of the Timurid Empire in Persia and Central Asia. Timur rose through the ranks by gaining the respect of local chieftains due to his personal valor in combat and his brigandage. His actions, whether raiding or in combat, caused many to flock to him. It was during a battle that arrows struck his right arm and leg which left him partially paralyzed. Because of this, Europeans referred to him as ‘Tamerlane’ or ‘Timur the Lame.’
Timur was born in Transoxania a member of Barlas tribe. He rose to power among the Ulus Chaghatay. The Ulus Chaghatay was nomadic tribal confederation that formed the central region of Mongolian Chaghadaid khanate. Timur's story is similar to Genghis Khan; How true these stories are is up for debate.
- When I rise, the world shall tremble! Tamerlane’s Deadly Drive into India—Part I
Tamerlane (also known as Timur the Lame) had the ambition of
restoring the Mongol Empire, almost 150 years after the death of Genghis
Khan. Between 1370 and 1405 he toured Asia, sacking cities, painting
their walls with blood, and destroying all the key power structures.
Timur played good cop – bad cop with the people he conquered. His most notable civilian bloodsheds are the sacking of Delhi (100,000) and crushing the revolt of Isfahan (200,000).
Expert Tip; Better to be alive and living in poverty than to be killed clutching your possessions.
You will be surprised to know Tamerlane was close to engaging in a
conflict that would have blown to pieces the Asian continent. Luckily,
he died before ordering his army to attack the Ming dynasty of China.
The self-entitled “Sword of Islam” cut deep and merciless. Compiling
the sources of the time, we confront horrifying statistics. More than 17
million perished because ambitious Tamerlane dreamt of taking over the
world.
The doors of Tamerlane.
Check out China’s less know rebellion!
10. An Lushan Rebellion – 21 million
Starting December 16, 755-February 17, 763, An Lushan Rebellion happened. It was during China’s Tang Dynasty. The war actually started when An Lushan who happened to be an ex-Tang general declared himself to be the new emperor.
The An Lushan rebellion was the end and a new start into reclaiming the Tang dynasty. It did not only affect the royal empire but the people as well were affected due to this warfare. It took years before the wounds of the past were healed in the empire.
- An Lushan Rebellion - The Devastating An-Shi Rebellion
Starting December 16, 755-February 17, 763, An Lushan Rebellion happened. It was during China’s Tang Dynasty. The war actually started when An Lushan who happened to be an ex-Tang general declared himself to be the new emperor.
At first glance, the An Lushan Rebellion seems to deserve just a footnote.
Expert Tip: History will never be able to coney the suffering of you or your people.
That’s the error most historians make when they fail to check the
numbers. More than 21 million perished as a result of an attempted coup
that was close to overthrowing one of the most influential dynasties of
the time.
General An Lushan detonated order and peace once he proclaimed himself emperor of Northern China in 755 AD.
Take a good look at the man who can be held responsible for the mess.
General An Lushan detonated order and peace once he proclaimed himself
emperor of Northern China in 755 AD. Seven years of turmoil followed,
during which China lost one-third of its population.
The painting below depicts the flight of the emperor from the capital of Chang’an, immediately before Lushan’s army seized it.
The flight of the emperor from the capital of Chang’an.
Although going that far, killing that many people, the rebellion eventually failed and came to an end in 763 AD.
The restored Tang became severely weakened and would exit the stage of history in less than two centuries later.
You have to see Spain’s second carnage in the New World…
11. Spanish Conquest of Mexico – 24 million
Only three decades after Christopher Columbus had discovered the New World the Spaniards were already busy exterminating the local populations at a ferocious scale.
TheSpanishConquest (1519-1521) April 21, 1519--theyearCeAcatl (OneReed) byAztecreckoning-- markedtheopeningofashortbutdecisivechapterinMexico'shistory. Onthatdayafleetof 11 Spanishgalleonssailingalongtheeasterngulfcoastdroppedanchorjustoffthewind-sweptbeachontheislandofSanJuandeUlúa.
- The SpanishConquest (1519-1521) : Mexico History
The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, also known as the Spanish–Mexican War, was one of the primary events in the Spanish colonization of the Americas.
More than 24 million died throughout the Spanish conquest of what is
modern day Mexico. Compared to that, the bloody sacrifices so engraved
in Aztec culture appear like a bruise your mother kisses to make it go
away.
How could less than 2,000 conquistadors overcome an army of 300,000
Aztecs, their well-fortified capital of Tenochtitlan, and the advantage
of the home ground? How could tens of millions be slaughtered in a
matter of decades?
The story of the Spanish conquest, as it has been commonly understood for 500 years, goes like this: Montezuma surrendered his empire to Cortés. Cortés and his men entered Tenochtitlán and lived there peacefully for months until rebellious Aztecs attacked them. Montezuma was killed by friendly fire. The surviving conquistadors escaped the city and later returned with Spanish reinforcements. They bravely laid siege to Tenochtitlán for months and finally captured it on Aug. 13, 1521, with the Spanish taking their rightful place as leaders of the land we now know as Mexico. Conquest accomplished.
"History is messy, and this story tidies up all of that mess and turns the messy, unpleasant war that took place 500 years ago into a nice, tidy dramatic narrative that has a hero [Cortés] and antihero [Montezuma] and has some kind of climactic, glorious ending," says Restall.
In When Montezuma Met Cortés, Restall revises this story. He ditches the word "conquest" and instead refers to the time as the Spanish-Aztec war. He says Cortés was a "mediocrity" with little personal impact on the unfolding of events and refocuses on complex territorial battles between the Aztecs and their rivals.
The Tlaxcallan Empire, which allied with the Spanish, was the driving force, outnumbering conquistadors 50-to-1 during the war with the Aztecs. Smallpox and a betrayal from an Aztec ally dealt the final blow. The wondrous island city fell, but it would take years for the Spanish to establish control in New Spain.
-NPR
Hernán Cortés exploited European style warfare to its maximum.
Cortez the Killer.
For the superstitious Aztecs, the horse and the guns appeared as the weapons of the Gods.
The Spanish contingent also boosted its numbers by initiating an alliance with the local Tlaxcala.
The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire.
Nevertheless, the biggest aid came in an invisible form. European germs proved to be a formidable army and childhood diseases like small pox and measles met no natural immunity in the bodies of the indigenous populations.
Yup. Biological warfare wiped out a complete empire.
Expert Tip: Beware of the use of biological warfare. It’s fighting war by stealth.
Explore on the next page another Chinese conflict that killed millions!
12. Qing vs. Ming – 25 million
Medieval China saw enough dynastic drama to make the wars in the West look like children’s play. Maybe that’s why Chinese movies and drama always focus on that time period.
Qing soldiers cutting hair of Chinese officals after Ming dynasty fall.
Between 1618 and 1683, China completed a full transition from its
southern Ming emperors to the new ruling elite coming all they from
northern Manchuria. You could say that in this fragment of history the
Starks were victorious.
As you suspect, the Ming did not leave without a fight. The Manchu
(Qing) retaliation was unprecedented. More than 25,000,000 lost their
lives in a conflict that spread across the entire land.
China is a nation of people who know nothing other than war, and want to avoid it at all costs.
Whole provinces like Sichuan and Jiangnan were completely depopulated, and chronicles mention massacres like the one of Yangzhou where 800,000 innocent souls perished.
Expert Tip: Major wars result in the depopulation of large swaths of territory. Entire states can end up empty.
The expression “women and children first” had a terrifyingly different meaning for the Qing generals.
At this point, we need to stress the fact that Qing Manchurians were foreigners who managed to conquer China mostly through betrayal and manipulation.
Their savagery will be avenged similarly just three centuries later.
Qing empire.
Check out the biggest land empire ever and the bloodshed it created.
13. Mongol Conquests – 35 million (+ 200 million bonus)
The Mongol Empire: Expansion of the Mongol empire from 1206 CE-1294 CE. During Europe’s High Middle Ages the Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous land empire in history, began to emerge. The Mongol Empire began in the Central Asian steppes and lasted throughout the 13th and 14th centuries.
- The Mongol Empire | Boundless World History
Mongols dominated the battlefields with their slim and fast mounted archers that made the most of Europe’s sluggish armored knights.
Watching a live world map of the world Mongol expansion shows just how quick and efficient the steppe riders moved across Eurasia.
The Mongol expansion was rapid and ruthless.
Mongols dominated the battlefields with their slim and fast mounted archers that made the most of Europe’s sluggish armored knights.
1. In 1201, Genghis Khan was shot in the neck during a battle and asked the defeated army who had shot “his horse”, trying to downplay the injury. The archer voluntarily confessed that he shot Genghis Khan himself and not his horse. He refused to beg for mercy saying if Genghis Khan desired to kill him, it was his choice, but if he would let him live, he would serve Genghis Khan loyally. Genghis Khan spared him, turning him into a great general. – Source
2. When Genghis Khan sent a trade caravan to the Khwarezmid Empire, the governor of one of the city seized it and killed the traders. Genghis Khan retaliated by invading the empire with 100,000 men and killing the governor by pouring molten silver down his eyes and mouth. Genghis Khan even went so far as to divert a river through the Khwarezmid emperor’s birthplace, erasing it from the map. – Source
3. Genghis Khan killed an estimated 40 million people, resulting in a man-made climate change. The Mongol invasions effectively cooled the planet, scrubbing around 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere. – Source
4. Genghis Khan’s chief adviser was a captured scholar named Yelu Chucai. His contribution to the Mongol Empire was to suggest that the Mongols not kill everyone, but tax them instead. – Source
5. Genghis Khan would marry off a daughter to the king of an allied nation, dismissing his other wives. Then he would assign his new son-in-law to military duty in the Mongol wars, while the daughter took over the rule. Most of his sons-in-laws died in combat, giving him shield around the Mongol lands. – Source
A typical Mongol siege of a normal Chinese fortified city.
Mongol warriors had the bad habit of executing hundreds of thousands of civilians at a time, making religious fanatics believe the Antichrist descended upon Earth.
Extermination Blues – Robin Trower
6. There’s a place in Mongolia called Ikh Khorig that was declared sacred by Genghis Khan. The only people allowed to enter were the Mongol Royal Family and a tribe of elite warriors, the darkhat, whose job was to guard it, punishment for entering being death. They carried out their task for 697 years, until 1924. – Source
7. Legends abound regarding the cause of Genghis Khan’s death, ranges from a fall from his horse while hunting, to an arrow to the knee, to an assassination plot executed by a captured princess. – Source
8. Genghis Khan exempted the poor and clergy from taxes, encouraged literacy, and established a free religion, leading many people to join his empire before they were even conquered. – Source
9. Shah Jahan, the emperor who built the Taj Mahal was a direct descendent of Genghis Khan – Source
10. The Mongols celebrated a victory over the Russians by laying survivors on the ground, dropping a heavy wooden gate on them, and then having a victory banquet on top of it while the victims suffocated and were crushed to death. – Source
Khutulun was the only daughter and youngest child in a family with 15 children. Her sibling rivalries growing up helped fashion her into the person she became. Because her father, Kaidu ruler of the Changatai Khanate, favored the old Mongol ways, Khutulun grew up in a nomadic lifestyle. This lifestyle gave her specialized training in wrestling, horseback riding, and as a warrior. It is said that when her father feuded with her uncle, Kublai Khan, she rode by his side throughout the campaigns.
The armies of Genghis Khan and his lieutenants operated like a surgeon, performing a lobotomy on most states of Asia and Eastern Europe.
Expert Tip: When confronting a large, disciplined Asian nation it is best to be their friends. The alternative is extermination.
11. Töregene Khatun, the daughter-in-law to Genghis Khan, ruled the Mongol Empire for 5 years at the height of its power and was arguably the most powerful woman in the history of the world – Source
12. The Mongols killed so many people in the Iranian Plateau that some historians estimate that Iran’s population did not again reach its pre-Mongol levels until the mid-20th century. – Source
13. Mongols were actually outnumbered in most of their victories in battles. They still managed to deceive their enemies by elaborate ruses like mounting dummies atop horses and tying sticks to the horses’ tails to create dust storms. – Source
14. In 1258, the Mongols destroyed Baghdad. Survivors said that “the waters of the Tigris ran black with ink from the enormous quantities of books flung into the river and red from the blood of the scientists and philosophers killed.” The siege marked the end of the Islamic Golden Age. – Source
15. The Mongols pulled their bowstrings back with their thumb. To prevent damage to their thumbs they created thumb rings. – Source
The only thing that stopped the world from becoming one giant pasture for Mongol horses was the sudden death of their supreme ruler.
You do not mess around with a powerful Asian nation.
16. Khutulun was a warrior princess. She was a Mongol princess who won 10,000 horses wrestling every man who wanted to marry her. – Source
17. People of the Mongol empire never washed their clothes or themselves because they believed washing would pollute the water and anger the dragons that controlled the water cycle. – Source
18. In 1254 C.E. Genghis Khan organized a formal religious debate between teams of Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists. The debate went on for multiple rounds on a variety of theological topics until the participants became so drunk that it concluded without any clear winner. – Source
19. Genghis Khan is considered the “most successful biological father in human history” with over 16 million descendants in Central Asia. – Source
20. In his youth, Genghis Khan killed his half-brother Bekhter for not sharing food.
The Mongol Horde were knocking at the gates of the former Roman empire.
21. Mongol leader Genghis Khan never allowed anyone to paint his portrait, sculpt his image or engrave his likeness on a coin. The first images of him appeared after his death. – Source
22. Genghis Khan invaded China with 90,000 troops and dominated the largest army in the world, the Jin Dynasty’s 1 million+ troops, and destroyed over 500,000 of them in the process and gained control of Northern China and Beijing. – Source
23. Mongols had rules against spilling noble blood over the ground. Instead, they used loopholes like making them bend backward until their backbones snapped, pouring molten silver into eyes and ears, and being rolled up in a rug and trampled to death by the Mongol cavalry. – Source
24. The Mongol Empire installed empire-wide messenger/postal stations 15-40 miles apart, stocked with food and fresh mounts that required passports for use, allowing for communication over the largest continuous empire in history. – Source
25. The deadliest war in the history was WWII, but the Mongol Invasions are a close second, despite occurring 700 years earlier, when the world’s population was only a fifth of what it was in 1945. – Source
Just when the people of Europe were celebrating the end of the Mongol menace, another wave of death immediately followed suit and bathed the continent in blood throughout the 14th century.
The riders have brought with them the bubonic plague.
Expert Tip: “Double Tap” is the only way to make sure.
Let’s visit again the slaughterhouse China was in the past…
14. Three Kingdoms War – 38 million
The Three Kingdoms War is one the bloodiest military conflicts in Chinese history.
The Three Kingdoms War is one the bloodiest military conflicts in Chinese history.
Most people perceive China as a monolith that existed peacefully
since its inception until today. That is far from being true. Back when
Europe was enjoying relative stability under Roman rule, the Celestial
Empire confronted one of the most prolonged crisis.
Between 184 and 280 AD China was divided in three empires – Wei, Shu,
and Wu. The three emerged after the breakdown of the Han dynasty and
would be again reunited by the Jin monarchs.
A map of the three kingdoms.
All historians base their life loss estimates on two national
censuses that give a difference of 38 million. Whether the calculations
were accurate will remain a mystery. Nevertheless, one thing is clear.
China has a formidable capacity of regenerating its population.
It seems that the Chinese were so happy once the century-long conflict ended that they celebrated mostly in their beds.
Expert Tip: After conflict have lots and lots of sex.
As we approach the end of the list, the death toll rises to emotional levels.
15. World War I – 40 million
World War I proved once more just how messed up Europe’s political map was at that time.
World War I, international conflict that in 1914–18 embroiled most of the nations of Europe along with Russia, the U.S., the Middle East, and other regions. It led to the fall of four great imperial dynasties and, in its destabilization of European society, laid the groundwork for World War II.
- World War I | Facts, Causes, & History | Britannica
World War I was a war that started to use technology to kill people with rapid ease in mass quantities.
An intricate network of alliances, friendships, and protectorates
turned the continent into a field of domino pieces waiting for the first
push. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was
nothing but a pretext for nations to jump at each other’s throat with a
ferocity never seen before.
12 Technological Advancements of World War ITanks.Flamethrowers.Poison Gas.Tracer Bullets.Interrupter Gear.Air traffic control.Depth Charges.Hydrophones.Aircraft Carriers.Pilotless Drones.
- 12 Technological Advancements of World War I | Mental Floss
The four short years of WWI would have made Napoleon and Genghis Khan
jealous. Breakthrough technologies meant that soldiers could kill each
other more efficiently. Airplanes and chemical weapons are just a few of
the innovations that gave WWI its sad reputation.
Gas warfare, heavy machine guns and trench warfare, along with airplanes and tanks were introduced during World war I.
The belief that WWI was a trench war is not far from the truth. Machine guns turned offensive warfare into mass suicide, so opponents often settled with bombarding each other’s positions and squabbling for the higher ground.
Expert Tip: Wars are not gallant and “Righteous”, they are dangerous and lethal events. Flee while that is still an option open to you.
Those lucky enough to survive WWI gave it a nickname that proved to
be inaccurate. The “War to End All Wars” was followed after two decades
by something even more frightening.
Check out China’s less know civil war!
16. Taiping Rebellion – 44.5 million
The Taiping Rebellion highlights one more time China’s incredible potential in hosting epic scale warfare.
The Taiping Rebellion was a civil war in China from 1850 to 1864. It was led by Hong Xiuquan. The Taiping Rebellion was against the ruling Qing Dynasty.About 20 million people died. [source?] Most of them were civilians. Hong established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (太平天囯). When it was most powerful, it had about 30 million people joining in it.
- Taiping Rebellion - Simple English Wikipedia
Capture of a British prisoner during the Taipeng war.
Also known as the Taiping Civil War, the conflict lasted between 1850 and 1864 and produced the most dramatic death toll in history at that time.
Uniforms and gear of the troops during the Taipeng war.
The rebellion started with the millenarian movement of the Heavenly Kingdom of Peace, which tried to overthrow the Qing dynasty.
Expert Tip: When the word “peace” is used as part of a slogan or name for a military organization, run away and flee. Nothing good can ever come of it.
The Taiping Rebellion, from 1851 to 1864, was the deadliest civil war in history. This column provides evidence that this cataclysmic event significantly shaped China’s Malthusian transition and long-term development that followed, especially in areas where the experiences that stemmed from the rebellion led to better property rights, stronger local fiscal capacity, and rule by leaders with longer-term governance horizons.
- A Most Uncomfortable Thought About The Taiping Rebellion And The Black Death – Maybe That’s How Development Starts?
As you seen saw far on the list, every significant political change
in the history of China came with savagery. The Taiping Rebellion counts
as the bloodiest civil war in history and makes the American equivalent
look like a banquet.
The Taipeng war was dangerous and bloody.
The man responsible for the uprising was Hong Xiuquan. He considered himself the brother of Jesus Christ and wanted to establish an empire based on his take on Christianity.
Expert Tip: Avoid people who claim religious or heavenly connections.
Although unsuccessful, the conflagration further weakened China’s
Manchurian dynasty and set the stage for the victorious Communist
Revolution we talked about earlier.
Let’s end the list with the bloodiest war that ever took place.
17. World War II – 58 million
As you probably guessed, World War II sits comfortably at the top of the charts.
World War II summary: The carnage of World War II was unprecedented and brought the world closest to the term “total warfare.”On average 27,000 people were killed each day between September 1, 1939, until the formal surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945.
- World War II - World & US History Online
Countries brought each other close to total annihilation in a global
conflict that lasted six years. The lure of extremist doctrines was
enough to convince millions to take arms and engage in bloodshed like
never seen before.
World War II threw the entire globe into upheaval with death and destruction on all continents.
From the total of 58 million deaths, more than 40 million were
civilians. Genocide, massacres, mass-bombings, as well as the inevitable
epidemics and starvation, left the world (especially Europe) in ruins.
Between 1939 and 1945 our planet became a large war machinery that
ran on steel and flesh, veiling the future with clouds of dark smoke.
The romantic view on war finally met its doom in the Stalingrad
slaughterhouse and the Nazi extermination camps.
Nazi Germany was a major “player” during World War II, but other nations were just as guilty in the way that they handled things and their relationships.
Hopefully, humanity will never repeat the mistakes that led to WWII. Naturally, some pessimists saw in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki grand finally a preview for a third installment – the all-out war that will wipe civilization and send survivors back to the Stone Age.
Expert Tip: Wars always use the latest in killing technology. Expect the worst, and take the necessary precautions.
Conclusion.
It’s nice to think that we are “modern”, “enlightened”, “progressive’ and “forward thinking”. But, unfortunately that is a big lie. Humans, at best, can only sustain a calm period of coexistence for a handful of decades. No longer. The fact and the truth is that blood was spilled ruthlessly for most of human history.
We erronously believe that wars and bloodshed are behind us.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I argue that we have never been closer to global warfare and at a level that is beyond our comprehension.
It will involved WMD technology, whether it is nuclear or biological, and it will begin stealthy. Most people will be unaware that there is a war going on and that “chess pieces” are moving into position until it is too late.
The only thing that we can do is prepare for a SHTF event. That means get to know all of your neighbors, be prudent in your stockpiling of food, and supplies (for use or barter) and have a garden and fruit bearing trees. Make sure that you are armed and very, very skilled at using them. Finally, do not be timid about fighting. You will need to assess who your friends and your enemies are and kill them if need be.
May your preparations never come to fruition. God bless.
If you enjoyed this post, please be sure to check out my SHTF index page. Here…
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The American civil war set the South on fire. There in the heart of the United States was endless desolation, death, crime, and violence on a very, very personal scale. It tore at the heart of America. In the midst of all this, was an exit of Americans who fled American for a life elsewhere. The confederates that fled the United States didn’t do so to set up a nation where slavery was legal. They went elsewhere to set up a state where they the people had more power than the local government there.
This is their story.
Lost but not defeated. The Confederacy left America and set up shop in Brazil.
History.
History is very interesting, and one of the most interesting things about it is that it is constantly changing. Our reality, our knowledge of history is under constant assault, and under constant revision.
I grew up being taught that Christopher Columbus discovered America, and that the native Indians entered via a Bering Sea “land bridge”. Today, it is pretty well established that there have been numerous explorations of North America by everyone from the Ancient Egyptians to the Vikings, and even the Chinese. And as time progresses we have a better understanding that ancient man, those who inhabited North America, had the ability to create boats and sail on the high seas in earnest without fear.
Surprise Discovery That Ancient Tin Ingots Found in Israel Came From England ... the British Isles had developed maritime trade routes with the rest of the world as early as the Bronze Age.
-Ancient Origins
But it’s not just that.
History is being rewritten to fit political narratives. Everything from “Islam is a nation of peace”, to “the Nazi Holocaust did not occur”. Everything is being rewritten. It’s a common theme, this reconstruction of history, and erasure of the past. We see it all the time, in every nation.
From the Taliban (and their friends the) ISIS destroying the statues of Buddha in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq to the destruction of statues in America and the rewrite of the political narratives for political expediency. It is everywhere. Once the Internet made mass erasure of the past expedient (a re-writable “white board”, if you will), everything has become prone to being erased and a new narrative written over it.
Enter President Obama
"Barack knows that we are going to have to make sacrifices; we are going to have to change our conversation; we're going to have to change our traditions, our history; we're going to have to move into a different place as a nation."
-Michelle Obama
Up until 2013, under President Obama, every single textbook and history book in the United States stated that the primary cause of the American Civil War was related to abuses of the tenth amendment. (Don’t believe me? Go visit a used book store, why won’t ya?)
They all were in lock-step with this narrative.
In American political discourse, states' rights are political powers held for the state governments rather than the federal government according to the United States Constitution, reflecting especially the enumerated powers of Congress and the Tenth Amendment.
The enumerated powers that are listed in the Constitution include exclusive federal powers, as well as concurrent powers that are shared with the states, and all of those powers are contrasted with the reserved powers—also called states' rights—that only the states possess.
-Wikipedia
For political reasons, and to reinforce his base, President Obama (around 2009 through 2014) rewrote history. Changing all internet references to the causes of the American Civil War from “States Rights” to “Slavery”. Today, if you visit any internet website on the causes of the American Civil War, you will discover that the causes are not listed as [1] Slavery, with a selection of [2] other causes that include “States Rights”.
Fun exercise;
Go to Wikipedia "The causes for the Civil War". Then go to the Revision History page. Check out the activity there, and the dates of the changes, as well as where the changes originated from.
This is interesting on numerous levels.
I find it interesting simply because all of the States that joined the Confederacy wrote up “Documents of Succession” that gave their reasons for leaving the United States union. And in those reasons, the top-most, A #1, most important reason was ‘States Rights”.
I mean, it’s RIGHT THERE.
There is no ambiguity there. The documents of succession list the reasons in great detail. (If a bit wordy.)
It’s in black and white.
It’s there, as plain as day. Not to mention that all of the discussions on succession that took place in the State capitals, and in the Federal Senate and Congress clearly state… unequivocally, that they left because the Federal government was interfering on the local and state level.
We won’t get too far into the rewriting discourse. That’s a subject for another time. Anyways, you can read about this rewriting of history and the reasons for it below. Don’t worry, the link opens up in a new tab.
The rights of the people
This is the “States Rights” issue. Where the United States Constitution plainly stated that the Rights of the people shall be held by them, or by their States. Not by the Federal Government.
After all, the PEOPLE created the government. And it must answer to them.
The American Constitution placed the power of the people over that of the government. This is a non-debatable issues, as all; every single document during the founding made this point quite clear and pronounced.
This did not go well in Washington D.C. for absolute power corrupts absolutely. They wanted more power. They wanted centralized power. They wanted it all.
They wanted it so much, that they fought a war over it.
And many, many people died.
Governments are created by citizens. They answer to the people. When they start to ignore them, it is the duty for the citizens to take back their government from the tyrants in power. This will often be very dangerous, bloody and nasty.
“We the people” lost the Civil War
Those who lost, lost everything. They ended up losing the independence of their States, as well as many of their freedoms. They also discovered that they now answered to a singular centralized government located in Washington D.C..
After the American civil war, for the most part, the Bill of Rights was proven to be a sham.
If you negate one enumerated Right, you negate them all. It's only a simple matter of time.
Confederate Soldier.
Then, in 2013 President Obama, in one of his many efforts to rewrite history, started the narrative that the Civil War was fought over slavery. And that most “white people” still wanted slavery and that “white people” should be punished for their “privilege”.
You can see this narrative being reinforced in the mainstream American media, in the universities, and by “diversity officers” in the corporate board rooms.
"I've never owned, or was a slave, and a large percentage of our forefathers weren't wealthy enough to own one either. Please stop blaming me because some prior white people were idiots -- and remember, tons of white, Indian, Chinese, and other races have been enslaved too -- it was wrong for every one of them. "
-Ted Nugent
An Obama follower (Cashing in on the “community organizer” scam.) instructing “white people” on their privilege…
Rewriting history to demonize a particular demographic is necessary to create “race wars” that lead to democide. This is a very important first step in all genocides. You select a group of people. You demonize them relentlessly. You disarm them. Then you kill them in mass. It is a historical norm, and well documented. In fact, it is almost one of the crowning achievements of the Marxism in the 20th century.
Abruptly and suddenly all historical narratives on the internet were rewritten to embrace this idea. And of course, news, media and academia marched lock-step to promote it.
"Mr. Obama never missed an opportunity to sew racial divide.
During his term in the Oval Office, racial relations literally went off the cliff. Mr. Obama and first lady Michelle promoted the false narrative that white America was literally guilty of hunting down blacks with glee.
They whipped up resentment in minority communities against the police, even though a Harvard study found that blacks are no more likely to be killed by police than whites."
-L. Todd Wood
Ah. But what of history?
Yes.
History.
Looking at history as a thinking person…
If the American confederates were so enraptured with slavery, wouldn’t they try to escape from the clutches of the Federal government when it appeared that the war was ending? Wouldn’t they flee with their favorite slaves? Wouldn’t they they relocate elsewhere to promote the core ideas slavery based Confederacy elsewhere?
Well, yes. You would think so.
Only, history tells us a different narrative.
The confederates that fled the United States didn’t do so to set up a nation where slavery was legal. They went elsewhere to set up a state where the people had more power than the government there.
Surprise! It just doesn't fit that "deplorable, Nazi, white privilege" narrative being shoved down our collective throats by the mainstream American media and their handlers the progressive Marxist Democrats.
As such, a study of these people who fled the Confederacy would be able to tell us all a lot about the causes of the American Civil War, and the things that were important to the membership of the Confederacy.
Let’s take a look at that.
The Confederados
Today... even though most of the Confederado descendants, being mainly of mixed race now, have fanned out to other parts of Brazil.
Many of the descendants from the original Confedrados, with the typical Brazilian flair, have an affinity for and carry on the traditions from their homeland; Such as Confederate uniforms and it's flag, southern food and their protestant Baptist religion.
Even though they identify with their past, they do consider themselves loyal Brazilian citizens. Maintaining a headquarters, as well as memorials and museums of their original descendant organization at the Campo center in Santa Bárbara D'Oeste.
-Historum
Brazil is well-known for being a cultural hub of South American life with its unmatched love for football, its fun and sexy dances like the samba, and its Latin people. It in so many ways, no way resembles anything like the Confederate States of America in the 19th-century South.
The Confederacy is alive and well within Brazil. There a man can be a gentleman, he can smoke a cigar and have a fine glass of XO while addressing young lasses as they stroll along the venue.
So what kind of fiction do we have to invent to combine the two and make them fit together?
The answer is none.
Because that’s exactly what happened in Americana, a municipality of Sao Paulo, Brazil. There, the residents call themselves the Confederados. As they are descendants of the 19th-century residents of the Confederate States of America.
The descendants of the Confederate States of America, living as expats in Brazil By studying the Confederatados one can better understand the motivations of people who decided to leave America for another nation.
The Confederados carry on all the cultural artifacts of the Confederacy. This includes the Confederate flag, Confederate army uniforms, and Confederate-style dancing with its own Brazilian flair.
It’s their heritage.
So how did this come to be?
By mid-1865 the American Civil War was over and the South had lost—everything.
It was over.
Her cities and farmland were destroyed, political rights denied, the finest of her husbands, fathers, and sons dead or disabled. With Lincoln dead and Radical Republican revenge on the horizon, the occupied territory of the southern United States did not appear to be a promising place for the foreseeable future.
The Confederados are a proud people with a proud and just heritage. They are thriving and they have embraced Brazilian culture while embracing their history.
Can you visualize what it must have been like?
Can you, really?
After the Civil War, many families from the old South were left landless and destitute. They probably hated living under a conquering army of Yankees.
Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II realized this group of disenchanted Americans could be a solution to one of his problems: how to develop the sparsely-settled areas of his country. He was especially interested in developing the cultivation of cotton, a crop well-known to the former Confederates. He provided incentives to people who knew how to raise cotton, offering land at twenty-two cents an acre with four years credit and passage to Brazil for thirty Yankee dollars. Each family was encouraged to bring a tent, light-weight furniture, farming supplies and seeds, and provisions to last six months.
Dom Pedro II sent recruiters into Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas in search of experienced cotton farmers for his country. Many southerners saw this as their only option for happiness, to build a community with southern values in the jungle of Brazil. They would become known as the Confederados.
-EOGN
Imagine today, in today’s polarized society. When the members of the OTHER political party gains the upper-hand and are Hell-bent on running things their way. Would you be willing to stay?
Would YOU?
Out-of-touch and insane liberal Rep. Maxine Waters has been in the hot seat over her calls for violence. Has she learned? Nope! In a recent interview, she demanded more liberals go after conservatives. he continued, “And I’m hopeful that even Democrats having seen the kind of outpouring of protests over 700 incidences of protests this weekend, seeing that they will be more forceful, more confrontational and more prepared to push back on this administration. I think that the people are showing them, this-this is what they would have us do.” [Source: Breitbart]
Given this level of politicized violence, a life as a second-rate citizen, and all your livelihood destroyed, with a Federally sanctioned attack on your culture, many Southerners decided to leave.
And so they did.
They skedaddled.
See ya! Bye!
The descendants of the expats of the Confederacy have embraced heir history, their heritage and their cuture without shame of sadness. They never had to endure the century of having their culture and their society belittled and made fun of.
Some resettled out west, others even relocated in the North, and some went as far as friendly England. But the most popular destination for expatriate Confederates was a country further south: Brazil, where summer is perpetual and the harvest year-round.
The colonists were ecstatic about what they saw, and one wrote back to the Mobile Daily Register:
“I have sugar cane, cotton, pumpkins, squash, five kinds of sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, cornfield peas, snap beans, butter beans, ochre [probably okra], tomatoes and fine chance at tobacco. I have a great variety of fruits on my place. I have made enough to live well on and am better pleased than other.”
-EOGN
Time to leave.
When the Civil War ended in 1865, many Southerners felt that they no longer fit in the United States. As such, they decided to go to a place where they could find cheap land to build new lives.
The Confederados all dressed up to reenact their history, their heritage and their society. When the Confederacy lost, they did not bow down to a tyrannical Federal government. They left. Today they are thriving, while their families who stayed behind now lives a life that is dictated out of Washington D.C. instead of locally managed.
In 1865, the Civil War ended with a Confederate loss and the Union abolishing slavery. The bloody conflict caused more than 600,000 military casualties and nearly depleted the Southern economy.
The North disbanded the Confederate army and began a period known as the Reconstruction. It wasn’t exactly welcomed in the South, and some decided to leave the United States for somewhere else.
-The Vintage News
Though General Robert E. Lee discouraged them from leaving, around 20,000 Southerners set sail for Brazil, the only time in American history where people left the country in large numbers for another one.
Square dances, Southern hospitality and fine Southern cooking are all traditions that are maintained and embraced inside of Brazil.
Accounts vary on how many left.
They vary from 10,000 to 20,000 families. We know that at a minimum of 10,000 boarded ships and went by sea. Those that took trains, or wagons down through Mexico are much more difficult to track.
Nor, do we do not know what happened to many of them. Obviously some died due to illness and sickness in the harsh tropics. Some just moved on elsewhere, and ended up in Argentina, and other South American nations. We do know that some of those who went to Brazil eventually sailed back to the US eventually. Well, because building a new life is surprisingly hard.
Today, we know that 94 of the original American families remained as their “blood lines” and “family names” are all predominant in the Americanized communities. These families became rich from growing cotton and sugarcane.
They are also the people from whom the modern-day Confederados are descended.
At least one shipload of Southerners docked in the port of Belém, set sail down the Amazon River and survived on berries and monkey meat, but perished from malaria. The only community of Confederates that survived was the group that got to the place they called Americana, which they chose because it most closely paralleled their home in Georgia.”
-News Punch
The saying “The South will Rise Again!” isn’t a fiction. It really has risen again. It rose in a place where there was liberty and freedom. And where talented Americans could thrive – Brazil.
They balkanized Brazil.
Those that arrived refused to integrate.
This group refused to learn Portuguese, built Baptist churches and their own schools, and made their own traditional meals like biscuits and gravy, pecan pie, and black-eyed peas. They believed that their ways of the Confederacy and their Southern lifestyle was superior to anything found in Brazil at the time.
Over the last 100 years, the original Confederate bloodlines were slowly diluted, resulting in today’s part-Spanish, part-Confederate descendants who speak mostly Portuguese but also speak English with a Southern drawl.
Brazil Welcomes the Confederacy
When the Confederacy was defeated in the US Civil War, Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil, a staunch ally of the Confederate cause, welcomed Confederate soldiers and sympathizers wishing to start a new life.
Thousands of Southerners, motivated by a hate of the wartime enemy and an instinctive urge to preserve Southern cultural values, flocked to Brazil.
They moved to a climate that in many ways resembled the American South. They moved to a place where they were permitted to keep their society, their culture and their heritage. They moved to a place where they were accepted as themselves.
Proud to be Confederate. Proud of their lifestyle. Proud of their heritage. Proud of their lifestyle.
“The Confederados, despite the usual problems of colonization, thrived in an environment that had defeated many settlers before them. Americana became an image of the antebellum period of the American south. Many of the first Baptist churches in Brazil were started there. They built public schools and provided education for their female children, something that was rare in Brazil. They flew the Confederate flag and enjoyed the traditional southern meals of biscuits and gravy, black-eyed peas and, of course, grits.The settlers had very European names like Stonewall and Butler. They would bake pecan pies, have debutante balls, and sing southern hymns. Only recently was the Confederate flag removed from the city’s crest. In 1906, US Secretary of State Elihu Root made a quick stop in Americana, but had little to say to the expatriates. Root later told his biographer that he left Americana weepy and had told the Confederados they’d never be welcome in the United States again.”
-News Punch
There was nothing random about the Southerners’ choice.
At the war’s end Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil, a Mason, began an extensive recruitment campaign. He did this primarily among his fellow Masonic brothers. He offered quite a bit. Indeed, he offered the world’s leading cotton-growing experts (American Southerners) some of the best cotton-growing land at twenty-two cents an acre, hoping to boost his own country’s developing economy.
Brazil Confederados showing the American stars and Bars with great pride.
The South’s most respected Robert E. Lee and other leaders throughout the South urged Southerners to resist the offers. They did not want to see a “brain drain” dilute the “strength of the South”. Indeed, the South had lost too many of her best men already.
Defeated and rejected in their own land, however, many Southerners responded to the warm welcome extended by the Brazilians, and Dom Pedro’s plan worked to the good of both parties.
Waves of Confederate immigrants
Over the next two decades as many as 20,000 Confederate refugees relocated to Brazil. We know that some of them eventually returned to the United States while others succumbed to deadly tropical disease. But several thousand brave pioneers remained permanently, not only forging a new life in a strange land but succeeding in it and making valuable contributions to their new country.
Proud Brazilian Confederados. They are the descendants of the expats who fled America over States Rights when the Federal government became far too large and trampled their lifestyle.
In 1866 an ex-senator from Alabama, Colonel William Norris, became the first American settler in Brazil. He purchased land near the Quilombo River in the state of São Paulo.
The William Hutchinson Norris from Alabama served in the Alabama Legislature as a member of the House of Representatives and later as a State Senator during the 1830's and 1840's...In 1861 he was the Grand Master of Masons in Alabama. No record has yet been found of him having served in the military during the Civil War period, or in any other period. During the 1820's he did serve in a Militia Unit in Wilcox County dealing with the Indians.
It should be noted that 6 of his sons served in the War and they were James Reece Norris, Robert Cicero, Francis Johnson, Henry Clay, Samuel Leonidas and Benjamin Harrison Norris. All except Francis Johnson Norris migrated to Brazil with the rest of the family. James Reece, Benjamin and Samuel returned to this country after several years in Brazil.
- The Alabama in the Civil War Message Board - Archive
A year later many more Americans followed. They came to settle in or near the “Norris colony” and in other areas throughout Brazil.
The Confederacy is alive and well in Brazil. Only they call it the Confederados.
When new arrivals saw 100% returns on their first two-year cotton plantings, the success stories brought new waves of Southerners fleeing worsening conditions (Please reference “Carpetbaggers & Scalawags“) back home.
In 1875 the Brazilian government built a railway station near Norris’s settlement—one hundred cars were needed to haul the popular watermelon crop alone in the late 1800’s—and the village that grew up around it soon became known popularly as Villa dos Americanos, “Town of the Americans.”
Confederados keeping their society and history alive. They are the only ones doing it. In America the South was lost and crumbled under the weight of the “new reformation” under the federal government.
Some of the families that settled
Many citizens of the Confederacy disappeared from public records at the end of the Civil War or soon thereafter. Of course, record keeping was spotty at best in the turmoil that followed the defeat of the Confederacy. If you can’t find your relatives during that time, you might be tempted to say, “Oh well, he (or she) probably died in the war.”
Don’t be so sure.
In 1868, a number of families from former Confederate states in the South fled the Reconstruction policies for Brazil. They settled in various regions of the country but, within a few years, concentrated near the current towns of Americana and Santa Barbara, Sao Paulo State.
These settlements were approximately 100 miles inland from the city of Sao Paulo. The family of Colonel William H. Norris was the first to arrive from Alabama. His son Robert C. Norris and daughter-in-law Martha Temperance [Patti] Steagall as well as his own daughter Angela Norris accompanied the Colonel, but son Saunders Norris remained at the family home of Mt. Pleasant, Alabama, 40 miles northeast of Mobile.
Robert Cicero Norris
Robert Cicero Norris was the son of Col. William Hutchison Norris. He was born in Perry County, Ala., March 7, 1837. His boyhood days were spent in Dallas County, Ala. From 1850 to 1856 he was a student at Fulton Academy, one of the best educational institutions of the State. Having finished the course there, he studied law under his father, though not intending to practice this profession; but he wished to inform himself concerning the laws of the country.
At the age of twenty he taught in a public school for a year, and then he went to Brundidge, Ala., where he studied medicine under Dr. J.H. Dewberry as preceptor. He matriculated in the Mobile Medical College (now University of Alabama). On January 28, 1861, his studies were interrupted when he went with other volunteers under Capt. Theodore O'Hara to Pensacola to seize the navy yards. He then returned to his studies.
On July 3, 1861, he enlisted in Company F, 15th Alabama Regiment, and went to Fort Mitchell for organization, and from there to Virginia, where his regiment served in Stonewall Jackson's brigade. In 1862 he was made sergeant major, serving in this capacity until 1864, and acted as adjutant much of the time. He was later assigned to Company A, 60th Alabama Regiment, and promoted to first lieutenant. In an engagement on Hatcher's Run he was captured and sent as a prisoner to Fort Delaware, where he was kept until June 17, 1865.
He arrived at his old home in Alabama on the 5th of July. During the four years' service he was wounded three times. He served in many battles and skirmishes, including Front Royal, Port Republic, Harper's Ferry, Cross Keys, Cold Harbor, Malvern Hill, Cedar Run, Second Manassas, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Brown's Ferry, Wilderness, Spottsylvania Courthouse, Second Cold Harbor, Petersburg, Darbytown Road, and Williamsburg Road.
At the end of 1865 he traveled to Brazil and settled in Villa Americana, State of Sao Paulo, being the first American to settle in that section of the country. Afterwards a flourishing American colony was established there. He returned to the Mobile in 1890 to study medicine. After completing his studies, he rejoined his wife and their 10 children in Brazil, where he established a successful practice. He retired from active life in 1911.
He was made a Mason in 1858 in the Fulton Lodge, Dallas County. In Brazil he took an active part in organizing a lodge, A.Y.M., in Santa Barbara, of which he was Senior Warden for two years, afterwards being elected to the position of Grand Master, which he held until his death. Dr. Robert C. Norris departed this life on May 14, 1913.
- see CONFEDERATE VETERAN, November 1913, Vol. 21, No. 11
Martha Temperance Steagall
Martha Temperance Steagall was born on February 4, 1850 in Union City, Obion County, Tennessee. She was the daughter of Henry Farrar Steagall and Delia Elizabeth (Peck) Steagall. She relocated with the rest of her family and her husband Robert C. Norris to Brazil in 1867. She and her husband had two daughters, Kennie and Julia and a son Robert Clay Norris. She died on September 16, 1933 in Washington, D.C.
- Special Collections & Archives Department Homepage
Robert Clay Norris
Robert Clay Norris was born January 5, 1872 in Santa Barbara d'Oeste, Sao Paulo, Brazil. He studied dentistry in Sao Paulo and assisted in the practice of Dr. I. G. Baumgardner before his untimely death on December 10, 1906. He married Ana Candida Escobar 1895 in Santa Barbara d'Oeste, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
- Special Collections & Archives Department Homepage
John Ridley Bufird
Prior to relocating to the American Civil War, John Ridley Buford was a resident of Eufaula, Alabama. He enlisted in April 1862, at Eufaula, Alabama and was appointed Sergeant in Captain Reuben Koulb's Battery of the Barbour Alabama Light Artillery. He was transferred on November 6, 1864, with the rank of private to the Eufaula Battery of Alabama Light Artillery. He was in St. Mary's Hospital at Union Springs, Alabama from September 29,1864, until November 6, 1864. Buford took part in the battles of Kentucky Campaign, Hood's Tennessee Campaign, and Chickamauga, and was paroled at Meridian, Mississippi, on May 10, 1865. At his parole, he listed his residence as Eufaula. In late February of 1867, Buford
moved to Santa Barbara, Brazil where he farmed tobacco. He was alive in 1913 at age of 72.
- Special Collections & Archives Department Homepage
While the Confederates that moved to Brazil came from all over the South, it does seem like the most notable ones originated out of Alabama for some reason. Curious.
I wonder why.
Alabama in one picture.
At the opening of the twentieth century officials adopted the name Villa Americana, and today the city begun by Confederate Americans, with a population of over 200,000, is called simply “Americana.”
Americana
A small town soon formed, and a train station was built when the first railroad line was constructed through the area in 1875. The train station was officially named “Villa da Estação de Santa Bárbara” (Santa Bárbara Station Town), but the nearby town became popularly known as “Villa dos Americanos” (Town of the Americans). The town was later officially named Americana.
-EOGN
Americana is still home to about 20,000 direct descendants of these original Southern planters. Though, Italian immigrants quickly moved in and eventually outnumbered them. However, there may be as many as ten times that number distributed all over, and throughout, all of Brazil.
Southern manners, gestures, and society is maintained and living well within Brazil. The expats who left the United States Confederacy set up a life inside of Brazil to maintain their culture and way of life.
The colonies remained a cloistered community for years to come. The Confederate refugees married among themselves and spoke only English. They also invested in separate schools, churches, and cemeteries, importing priests and teachers from the United States.
The colonists founded the first Baptist Church in Brazil, together with the Campo Cemetery in which members of the Protestant religion were buried, according to their tradition.
Alison Jones, who was a third-generation descendant of the original settlers, described her experience growing up in such an environment to the Seattle Times in a 1995 interview: “I remember when I was 4 years old, I was lost in a textile factory and I couldn’t tell the people anything because I only spoke English. I didn’t learn Portuguese until I started school.”
-The Vintage News
They are in their fifth and sixth generations now.
On the whole, despite English-sounding names and lingering Southern accents for some, these down-stream Confederados think, look, and act like other Brazilians.
Young Confederados keeping their history, their society, and their traditions alive.
New waves of immigrants settled in and near Americana, notably large numbers of Italians and Germans in the 1880s. The families intermarried over the years, and today Americana’s population is described as a mixture of Luso-Afro-Brazilians (Luso meaning Portuguese) and immigrants, mainly Italian, Portuguese, German, and Arabic. The name of Americana still survives, and because of intermarriages, almost all of today’s citizens of the area can claim some Confederados ancestry. Indeed, English (with a southern accent) is the unofficial second language of the area and is still spoken by many in the area.
Today Americana is a city of 120,000 people. The ties to the old South live on. Festa Confederada is a celebration that takes place in the cemetery where the old Confederates are buried. The food served includes southern fried chicken, vinegar pie, chess pie, and biscuits. Banjos are played and Confederate songs are sung. The men wear Confederate uniforms, and the women dress in pink and blue and wear matching ribbons in their hair. The festival often looks like scenes from “Gone With the Wind.”
-EOGN
Though, you know, holding on to heritage and traditions is a good thing. Today in the Untied States we have forgotten many traditions and our heritage. Instead, we have replaced our history with pale versions.
Instead of eating fine home cooked meals, we eat progressive and modern fake-meat at McDonald’s. Instead of having a good home made baked pie, we get a mocha caramel latte smoothy from Starbucks. Instead of having home-made sweet-potato pie, we eat a Oreo cookie from the local 7-11.
I think we are missing out.
Pecan pie done right. We have lost things that used to matter to us, and what made our lives special and important.
Slavery
The conventional (Obama era) narrative is that the Confederacy was all about slavery. The idea was that the Civil War was all about “white people” desirous of having and owning slaves. That is the causes of the American Civil War they say. They argue that a war needed to be fought not only to “free the slaves” but to teach a lesson to all those “white people” who have the deplorable notion that slavery can be institutionalized.
If this narrative is what is being portrayed as the reason, history says otherwise.
Of the 20,000 confederate immigrant families, only four people owned slaves.
Four People.
This held true, even though slavery was legal in Brazil. As well as legal in almost all of South America at that time.Why didn’t the survivors of the Confederacy create an expat Confederacy with slavery?
Why didn’t they?
It’s strange, and doesn’t fit the progressive liberal Obama-era narrative.
This has been born out by the work of Alcides Gussi, an independent researcher of the State University of Campinas, Sao Paolo. Who claims that only four families actually owned slave labor, with a total number of 66 slaves, in the period between 1868 to 1875.
Some cases were recorded in which the freed slaves decided to accompany their former masters. Most notable was the story of Steve Watson. Watson went to Brazil, together with Judge Dyer of Texas, his former owner, who assigned him to be an administrator of a sawmill. At one point, Dyer decided to return to the U.S., due to a combination of homesickness and financial failure. He left all his property in Brazil to Watson.
Judith McKnight Jones, a great-granddaughter of one of the original American settlers, tried to explain the reasons for her family’s departure from Texas during the migration to the Seattle Times:
“They came here because they felt that their ‘country’ had been invaded and their land confiscated. To them, there was nothing left there. So, they came here to try to re-create what they had before the war. I grew up listening to the stories. They were angry and bitter. When they talked about it, moving here, the war, leaving their homes, it was always a very sore subject for them.”
-The Vintage News
Proud to be a Confederado. How many Americans can be so open and brazen about their history, their society and their heritage? Not many. That’s why the confederates fled the United States. They yearned for Freedom and Liberty.
The Festa Confederada
Once a year, however, at the Festa Confederada, the South rises in their blood to celebrate their heritage.
The correct name for the celebration is FEsta Confederada (FIEsta is Spanish, not Portuguese): http://festaconfederada.com.br/.
Proud descendants, most of mixed races, fly the Confederate flag—there is no racial stigma attached to it in Brazil.
Some pretty Confederate lasses doing and living well inside Brazil.
Women deck out as Southern belles, complete with hoop skirts, while the men don uniforms of Confederate gray, dance with the girls, and drink over the War.
On the menu are Southern fried chicken, chess pie, and mouth-watering biscuits; “Dixie” plays in the background. Were it not for the Portuguese being spoken by participants, an observer might imagine himself in Mississippi or Alabama of a hundred and fifty years ago.
Southern belles of the Confederacy living fine and well in Brazil.
The meeting ground is Campo Cemetery near neighboring Santa Barbara d’Oeste, where most of their ancestors are buried. Confederados built the cemetery, near the first Presbyterian church in Brazil, when Catholics would not permit space for Protestant burial in their own churchyards.
An imposing memorial, boasting the stars-and-bars of the Confederate battle flag, stands in the middle of the cemetery, bearing the names of the early Confederados, the great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers of those who sing and dance and remember the land their families used to call home.
Today
Indeed, to this day, throughout towns in Brazil, the Confederacy and Southern US culture is celebrated annually. It is done so by the many thousands of descendants of these Americans, known locally as Confedorados. Now, after six or seven generations, many of whom now have non-white and African heritage.
The expats of the descendants of the American Confederacy are living well and good in Brazil.
Square dances are held, and confederate flags are flown proudly. Any racial connotations are long lost and remain tied to American special-interest groups fighting for political supremacy. Meanwhile, the Confederados maintain their society, one of many, amid the sea of racial diversity in Brazil.
The Confederados pay tribute to their history and their culture, deep within the forests of Brazil. For in many ways, it well resembled their homeland in Georgia and Mississippi.
Some Links for further study…
You can learn more about this settlement and the families who lived there by starting online. Auburn University has a large Confederados Collection; a guide to the collection may be found at http://www.lib.auburn.edu/archive/find-aid/958.htm.
A web site of the history of the Confederados may be found at http://www.confederados.com.br/. This web site also contains a list of Confederados families.
Much more information may be found in The Confederados: Old South Immigrants in Brazil,
a book by by Cyrus B. Dawsey (Editor), James M. Dawsey (Editor),
Michael L. Conniff (Foreword), & 9 more, available on Amazon at http://goo.gl/8IOgcs.
And now for my opinion…
Finally, my take on Obama rewriting history so that myself and others like me can be erased for our “white privilege” and a new Marxist society can be built upon our salted graves…
My relatives were too busy struggling with a potato blight in Ireland , and having to get drawn into servitude to escape it, and enslavement by the Russians in Poland. Don’t know about that, do you? It doesn’t fit the desired political narrative. Yeah. Just like your pampered baby who cries when it tosses it’s food on the floor. Life is hard. Get over it.
Get. Over. It.
What I opine about is not about the things that I personally experienced regarding the American Civil War. As I have no experiences, have you? Nope. The American Civil War ended a long, long time ago. Everyone who participated in it is now DEAD. They are dead. Long, long dead. If you did dig them up, you will see rotting flesh and foul odors.
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are
some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you
might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up
in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society
within communist China. As there are some really stark differences
between the two.
More Posts about Life
I have
broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones
actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little
different, in subtle ways.
Funny Pictures
Be the Rufus – Tales of Everyday Heroism.
Articles & Links
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find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is a great short story from Ray Bradbury from his collection of short stories titled "R is for Rocket". This story is short, and nice, and is presented here in full text for easy reading. It concerns a man who was born with large green wings, who somehow lost his way in life, and how (with the help of his children) was reborn again.
Uncle Einar
“It will take only a minute,” said Uncle Einar’s sweet wife.
“I refuse,” he said. “And that takes but a second.”
“I’ve worked all morning,” she said, holding to her slender back, “and you won’t help? It’s drumming for a rain.”
“Let it rain,” he cried, morosely. “I’ll not be pierced by lightning just to air your clothes.”
“But you’re so quick at it.”
“Again, I refuse.” His vast tarpaulin wings hummed nervously behind his indignant back.
She gave him a slender rope on which were tied four dozen fresh-washed clothes. He turned it in his fingers with distaste. “So it’s come to this,” he muttered, bitterly. “To this, to this, to this.” He almost wept angry and acid tears.
“Don’t cry; you’ll wet them down again,” she said. “Jump up, now, run them about.”
“Run them about.” His voice was hollow, deep, and terribly wounded. “I say: let it thunder, let it pour!”
“If it was a nice, sunny day I wouldn’t ask,” she said, reasonably. “All my washing gone for nothing if you don’t. They’ll hang about the house — “
That did it. Above all, he hated clothes flagged and festooned so a man had to creep under on the way across a room. He jumped up. His vast green wings boomed. “Only so far as the pasture fence!”
Whirl: up he jumped, his wings chewed and loved the cool air. Before you’d say Uncle Einar Has Green Wings he sailed low across his farmland, trailing the clothes in a vast fluttering loop through the pounding concussion and backwash of his wings!
“Catch!”
Back from the trip, he sailed the clothes, dry as popcorn, down on a series of clean blankets she’d spread for their landing.
“Thank you!” she cried.
“Gahh!” he shouted, and flew off under the apple tree to brood.
Uncle Einar’s beautiful silk-like wings hung like sea-green sails behind him, and whirred and whispered from his shoulders when he sneezed or turned swiftly. He was one of the few in the Family whose talent was visible. All his dark cousins and nephews and brothers hid in small towns across the world, did unseen mental things or things with witch-fingers and white teeth, or blew down the sky like fire-leaves, or loped in forests like moon-silvered wolves. They lived comparatively safe from normal humans. Not so a man with great green wings.
Not that he hated his wings. Far from it! In his youth he’d always flown nights, because nights were rare times for winged men! Daylight held dangers, always had, always would; but nights, ah, nights, he had sailed over islands of cloud and seas of summer sky. With no danger to himself. It had been a rich, full soaring, an exhilaration.
But now he could not fly at night.
On his way home to some high mountain pass in Europe after a Homecoming among Family members in Mellin Town, Illinois (some years ago) he had drunk too much rich crimson wine. “I’ll be all right,” he had told himself, vaguely, as he beat his long way under the morning stars, over the moon-dreaming country hills beyond Mellin Town. And then — crack out of the sky —
A high-tension tower.
Like a netted duck! A great sizzle! His face blown black by a blue sparkler of wire, he fended off the electricity with a terrific back-jumping percussion of his wings, and fell.
His hitting the moonlit meadow under the tower made a noise like a large telephone book dropped from the sky.
Early the next morning, his dew-sodden wings shaking violently, he stood up. It was still dark.
There was a faint bandage of dawn stretched across the east. Soon the bandage would stain and all flight would be restricted. There was nothing to do but take refuge in the forest and wait out the day in the deepest thicket until another night gave his wings a hidden motion in the sky.
In this fashion he met his wife.
During the day, which was warm for November first in Illinois country, pretty young Brunilla Wexley was out to udder a lost cow, for she carried a silver pail in one hand as she sidled through thickets and pleaded cleverly to the unseen cow to please return home or burst her gut with unplucked milk. The fact that the cow would have most certainly come home when her teats really needed pulling did not concern Brunilla Wexley. It was a sweet excuse for forest-journeying, thistle-blowing, and flower chewing; all of which Brunilla was doing as she stumbled upon Uncle Einar.
Asleep near a bush, he seemed a man under a green shelter.
“Oh,” said Brunilla, with a fever. “A man. In a camp-tent.”
Uncle Einar awoke. The camp-tent spread like a large green fan behind him.
“Oh,” said Brunilla, the cow-searcher. “A man with wings.”
That was how she took it. She was startled, yes, but she had never been hurt in her life, so she wasn’t afraid of anyone, and it was a fancy thing to see a winged man and she was proud to meet him. She began to talk. In an hour they were old friends, and in two hours she’d quite forgotten his wings were there. And he somehow confessed how he happened to be in this wood.
“Yes, I noticed you looked banged around,” she said. “That right wing looks very bad. You’d best let me take you home and fix it. You won’t be able to fly all the way to Europe on it, anyway. And who wants to live in Europe these days?”
He thanked her, but he didn’t quite see how he could accept.
“But I live alone,” she said. “For, as you see, I’m quite ugly.”
He insisted she was not.
“How kind of you,” she said. “But I am, there’s no fooling myself. My folks are dead, I’ve a farm, a big one, all to myself, quite far from Mellin Town, and I’m in need of talking company.”
But wasn’t she afraid of him? he asked.
“Proud and jealous would be more near it,” she said. “May I?” And she stroked his large green membraned veils with careful envy. He shuddered at the touch and put his tongue between his teeth.
So there was nothing for it but that he come to her house for medicaments and ointments, and my! what a burn across his face, beneath his eyes! “Lucky you weren’t blinded,” she said. “How’d it happen?”
“Well. . .” he said, and they at her farm, hardly noticing they’d walked a mile, looking at each other.
A day passed, and another, and he thanked her at her door and said he must be going, he much appreciated the ointment, the care, the lodgings. It was twilight and between now, six o’clock, and five the next morning, he must cross an ocean and a continent. “Thank you; good-bye,” he said, and started to fly off in the dusk and crashed right into a maple tree.
“Oh!” she screamed, and ran to his unconscious body.
When he waked the next hour he knew he’d fly no more in the dark again ever; his delicate night-perception was gone. The winged telepathy that
had warned him where towers, trees, houses and hills stood across his path, the fine clear vision and sensibility that guided him through mazes of forest, cliff, and cloud, all were burnt forever by that strike across his face, that blue electric fry and sizzle.
“How?” he moaned softly. “How can I go to Europe? If I flew by day, I’d be seen and — miserable joke — maybe shot down! Or kept for a zoo perhaps, what a life that’d be! Brunilla, tell me, what shall I do?”
“Oh,” she whispered, looking at her hands. “We’ll think of something. . . .”
They were married.
The Family came for the wedding. In a great autumnal avalanche of maple, sycamore, oak, elm leaf they hissed and rustled, fell in a shower of horse chestnut, thumped like winter apples on the earth, with an overall scent of farewell-summer on the wind they made in their rushing. The ceremony? The ceremony was brief as a black candle lit, blown out, and smoke left still on the air. Its briefness, darkness, upside-down and backward quality escaped Brunilla, who only listened to the great tide of Uncle Einar’s wings faintly murmuring above them as they finished out the rite. And as for Uncle Einar, the wound across his nose was almost healed and, holding Brunilla’s arm, he felt Europe grow faint and melt away in the distance.
He didn’t have to see very well to fly straight up, or come straight down. It was only natural that on this night of their wedding he take Brunilla in his arms and fly right up into the sky.
A farmer, five miles over, glanced at a low cloud at midnight, saw faint glows and crackles.
“Heat lightning,” he observed, and went to bed.
They didn’t come down till morning, with the dew.
The marriage took. She had only to look at him, and it lifted her to think she was the only woman in the world married to a winged man. “Who else could say it?” she asked her mirror. And the answer was: “No one!”
He, on the other hand, found great beauty behind her face, great kindness and understanding. He made some changes in his diet to fit her thinking, and was careful with his wings about the house; knocked porcelains and broken lamps were nerve-scrapers, he stayed away from them. He changed his sleeping habits, since he couldn’t fly nights now anyhow. And she in turn fixed chairs so they were comfortable for his wings, put extra padding here or took it out there, and the things she said were the things he loved her for. “We’re in our cocoons, all of us. See how ugly I am?” she said. “But one day I’ll break out, spread wings as fine and handsome as you.”
“You broke out long ago,” he said.
She thought it over. “Yes,” she had to admit. “I know just which day it was, too. In the woods when I looked for a cow and found a tent!” They laughed, and with him holding her she felt so beautiful she knew their marriage had slipped her from her ugliness, like a bright sword from its case.
They had children. At first there was fear, all on his part, that they’d be winged.
“Nonsense, I’d love it!” she said, “Keep them out from under foot.”
“Then,” he exclaimed, “they’d be in your hair!”
“Ow!” she cried.
Four children were born, three boys and a girl, who, for their energy, seemed to have wings. They popped up like toadstools in a few years, and on hot summer days asked their father to sit under the apple tree and fan them with his cooling wings and tell them wild starlit tales of island clouds and ocean skies and textures of mist and wind and how a star tastes melting in your mouth, and how to drink cold mountain air, and how it feels to be a pebble dropped from Mt. Everest, turning to a green bloom, flowering your wings just before you strike bottom!
This was his marriage.
And today, six years later, here sat Uncle Einar, here he was, festering under the apple tree, grown impatient and unkind; not because this was his desire, but because after the long wait, he was still unable to fly the wild night sky; his extra sense had never returned. Here he sat despondently, nothing more than a summer sun-parasol, green and discarded, abandoned for the season by the reckless vacationers who once sought the refuge of its translucent shadow. Was he to sit here forever, afraid to fly by day because someone might see him? Was his only flight to be as a drier of clothes for his wife, or a fanner of children on hot August noons? His one occupation had always been flying Family errands, quicker than storms. A boomerang, he’d whickled over hills and valleys and like a thistle, landed. He had always had money; the Family had good use for their winged man! But now? Bitterness! His wings jittered and whisked the air and made a captive thunder.
“Papa,” said little Meg.
The children stood looking at his thought-dark face.
“Papa,” said Ronald. “Make more thunder!”
“It’s a cold March day, there’ll soon be rain and plenty of thunder,” said Uncle Einar.
“Will you come watch us?” asked Michael.
“Run on, run on! Let papa brood!”
He was shut of love, the children of love, and the love of children. He thought only of heavens, skies, horizons, infinities, by night or day, lit by star, moon, or sun, cloudy or clear, but always it was skies and heavens and horizons that ran ahead of you forever when you soared. Yet here he was, sculling the pasture, kept low for fear of being seen.
Misery in a deep well!
“Papa, come watch us; it’s March!” cried Meg. “And we’re going to the Hill with all the kids from town!”
Uncle Einar grunted. “What hill is that?”
“The Kite Hill, of course!” they all sang together.
Now he looked at them.
Each held a large paper kite, their faces sweating with anticipation and an animal glowing. In their small fingers were balls of white twine. From the kites, colored red and blue and yellow and green, hung caudal appendages of cotton and silk strips.
“We’ll fly our kites!” said Ronald. “Won’t you come?”
“No,” he said, sadly. “I mustn’t be seen by anyone or there’d be trouble.”
“You could hide and watch from the woods,” said Meg. “We made the kites ourselves. Just because we know how.”
“How do you know how?”
“You’re our father!” was the instant cry. “That’s why!”
He looked at his children for a long while. He sighed. “A kite festival, is it?”
“Yes, sir!”
“I’m going to win,” said Meg.
“No, I’m!” Michael contradicted.
“Me, me!” piped Stephan.
“Wind up the chimney!” roared Uncle Einar, leaping high with a deafening kettledrum of wings. “Children! Children, I love you dearly!”
“Father, what’s wrong?” said Michael, backing off.
“Nothing, nothing, nothing!” chanted Einar. He flexed his wings to their greatest propulsion and plundering. Whoom! they slammed like cymbals. The children fell flat in the backwash! “I have it, I have it! I’m free again! Fire in the flue! Feather on the wind! Brunilla!” Einar called to the house. His wife appeared. “I’m free!” he called, flushed and tall, on his toes. “Listen, Brunilla, I don’t need the night anymore! I can fly by day! I don’t need the night! I’ll fly every day and any day of the year from now on! — but I waste time, talking. Look!”
And as the worried members of his family watched, he seized the cotton tail from one of the little kites, tied it to his belt behind, grabbed the twine ball, held one end in his teeth, gave the other end to his children, and up, up into the air he flew, away into the March wind!
And across the meadows and over the farms his children ran, letting out string to the daylit sky, bubbling and stumbling, and Brunilla stood back in the farmyard and waved and laughed to see what was happening; and her children marched to the far Kite Hill and stood, the four of them, holding the ball of twine in their eager, proud fingers, each tugging and directing and pulling. And the children from Mellin Town came running with their small kites to let up on the wind, and they saw the great green kite leap and hover in the sky and exclaimed:
“Oh, oh, what a kite! What a kite! Oh, I wish I’d a kite like that! Where, where did you get it!”
“Our father made it!” cried Meg and Michael and Stephen and Ronald, and gave an exultant pull on the twine and the humming, thundering kite in the sky dipped and soared and made a great and magical exclamation mark across a cloud!
The End
Fictional Story Related Index
This is an index of full text reprints of stories that I have
read that influenced me when I was young. They are rather difficult to
come by today, as where I live they are nearly impossible to find. Yes,
you can find them on the internet, behind paywalls. Ah, that’s why all
those software engineers in California make all that money. Well, here
they are FOR FREE. Enjoy reading them.
Movies that Inspired Me
Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
My Poetry
Art that Moves Me
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Here is a great selection of fantastic, easy to make, and fun family sit-down meals for dinner. This post discusses “real” American food. Not “American fast food”, which it seems (to everyone outside of the USA) is what Americans eat all the time. We do not. We eat something else, something all together different. We eat tasty, aromatic and tasty delicious food. Don’t you know.
Hey! It’s true!
In our homes, with our families, we “break bread” with love, happiness, care and concern. We eat healthy, fine and delicious food. We share the events of the day, and we laugh and cry as the day’s events are presented. We are not alone. We are part of a bigger identity.
Fast food does not represent America. It is an off-shoot of the “modern” progressive-reality that was thrust upon the shoulders of America. We have been dealing with it since 1913, and it’s only been recently that we have decided to shake it off.
It's like coffee. Most Americans do not drink Starbucks coffee daily. Many do, but not most. Coffee is a deeply personal thing with most Americans.
American food, like coffee is a very unique and special treat. Something that does NOT resemble the monetized versions available to the rest of the world.
Surprise!
Here we talk about “dinner time”. That most special and sacred time of the day for many (but not all) Americans. It was the time when a family would take off their soiled work clothes, put aside their school book bags, and sit down together for a fine, nutritious meal. One that was (traditionally) cooked with care and love by the woman of the house.
Delicious meal at dinner time, where the entire family comes together to share the events of the day and spend happy times together.
Ah, but times have changed. Oh, maybe so. But not inherently. Americans are still Americans. You cannot change who we are on the inside. We are social beings that value our time together with loved ones. Most especially with our families.
Americans are still capable of love for their families.
Yes. I do know all about the injection of “modern progressiveness” into the American culture back in 1913. I am quite cognizant on how it altered and deformed American cultures and resulted in almost all of the problems that America experiences today.
Yes. I know.
How many Americans eat dinner. They eat alone, mostly fast food, or easily prepared meals, staring in front of a televisions set or computer screen.
I know, it used to be, back in the days leading up to the 1970’s and the destruction of the American family, everyone would have a “sit down” “typical” American meal. (The link opens up in another tab.)
I also know how this tradition pretty much was under assault, and how the death blow smashed it to pieces in the 1970’s. Ah, yes, you can thank President Wilson for that as well. The Federal Reserve put a death-grip strangle hold on the American family.
This is the world that all that modern progressiveness wrought.
This is the world that all that modern progressiveness wrought. It starts at youth. It consists of eating cheap, easy to make meals, in front of mindless electronic media.
This tradition pretty much ended during the 1970’s when families had to split apart to earn enough to make ends meet. Thus, a progressive (or “enlightened”) reality took hold; also known as “everyone forage for themselves”, or “meals by yellow-sticky notes on the refrigerator”.
It goes by other terms as well, as (the) fast-food television binge, or the creation of “easy and cheap meals”.
It’s what living a “progressive” life is all about. It’s about money. It’s about making ends meet. It’s about keeping up with the Joneses. It’s about living a life that matches the expectations shown in television, movies, and social media.
it’s all one big lie.
If we’re too busy to have dinner as a family regularly, we may want to re-examine our priorities.
We probably are too busy. Period.
While our smartphones and devices have brought us closer to the rest of humanity, it is the family that will stick with us through thick and thin.
It is simply amazing that something as simple as eating together as a family may bring manifold benefits to all family members. Family meals are for nourishment, comfort and support. As we nourish our body, we nourish our family relationships.
After all, food is better eaten with the people we love!
- Eating together helps families bond
It’s sad.
Oh you don’t know what I am talking about, eh? You think it’s an accident that tomatoes today taste like cardboard and are filled with water? You think it was an accident, or just the way it’s always been. Oh no. It’s what happens when modern, progressive scientists re-engineer society to make it “better”.
Click on the link (it opens up in a different tab) for easy browsing…
Here’s a picture of the “modern, progressive lifestyle” that many Americans have had to confront. Sad…
It’s how NOT to raise a family.
How not to raise a family. Mother is not cooking delicious meals. She is working at home and teaching her daughter to do the same. Father is scrounging in the kitchen and teaching his son to forage. No family togetherness. No family group discussions. No sharing, and no joy. It’s stress. It’s the progressive lifestyle you all!
All these progressives, with their modern (well meaning intentions) have totally wrecked the world. Look at the pollution. Look at the family life. Look at what it takes to get ahead. It’s not an accident people!
Ahhh!
How NOT to eat a family meal. You face each other, not electronic media. You share the time, and you talk to each other. This kind of life, where everyone is off and alone in their own individual worlds is a progressive lie brought forth by President Wilson.
However, do not be distressed. A rising percentage of Americans are revitalizing the old-fashioned “sit down” formal dinner time meals. It’s making a much needed comeback. And I, I for one, think that this trend is glorious!
What is better than delicious food? What is better than fine tasty drink and friends and family to share the day’s events with? Heck! It sure beats looking that the latest posts on Facebook, watching a cat video on You-tube, or reading the “news” on your Google feed.
Yeppur!
It’s people. It”s feeling. It’s emotions. It’s sharing our life with others, and that is absolutely wonderful.
Family meals done right…
Family meals done right. Both parents are present. Everyone is smiling and talking and fine love-cooked food is presented in happy friendliness.
This is great, and people (!) this post discusses what they would be eating during all of this.
My in-laws
It has gradually dawned on me that no one (outside of the United States) has any idea what Americans eat. They think, and they really do believe this, that all that Americans eat are hamburgers and Pizza.
You laugh.
But, it’s true!
While there is a certain degree in truth to that, it’s not actually true. When I was growing up, we rarely had pizza or hamburgers. That was something that was reserved to eat “outside” of the home. Or, alternatively, something we would have at a Cub Scout cookout, or at a baseball game. It wasn’t a formal sit down meal food.
Home cooked food was tastier, healthier, cheaper, and was served in a communal setting where we all faced each other. We weren’t staring into a television set, a laptop, or a cell phone. We faced each other.
Face to face.
With delicious food, with the fine aromas wafting towards us.
American style dinner done right! The entire family is together, sharing a fine home-cooked meal and being together.
Now, I am in China.
My in-laws know nothing about the American household lifestyle. All they know is what they watch on the television show “Friends”, or The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
But, you know, my family was more like Mayberry RFD than Cheers.
This has come down to the point where my father-in-law brought groceries home from the market today. He passed them on to the women folk to cook, and he proudly displayed a McDonalds bag with a cold chicken sandwich and wilted french-fries for me to consume. He beamed with pride. (Obviously “virtue signalling” to me that he cared about me and my culture.)
Ugh!
Central Perk. The six main protagonists frequently visited Central Perk throughout the series. It is situated in New York City’s Greenwich Village, in the same apartment block as Monica’s apartment. It was where they spent much of their free time conversing. There are 97 steps away from Chandler and Joey’s apartment as Joey counts in The One With George Stephanopoulos.
Ah! Is that how the rest of the world thinks of Americans? As some kind of comic book character. One devoid of emotion, a crisply packaged collection of cheap food in bright colorful plastic wrappings?
He was so proud, and he wanted to show me how he was thinking of me and supportive of me. Thank’s Pop. But, you know, I do like other things…
And thus this post came into being.
The meals
“The table is where we mark milestones, divulge dreams, bury hatchets, make deals, give thanks, plan vacations and tell jokes. It’s also where children learn the lessons that families teach: Manners, co-operation, communication, self-control values. Following directions. Sitting still. Taking turns. It’s where we make up and make merry. It’s where we live, between bites.”
-Eating together helps families bond
So, here’s a list of some fine and delicious American food.
Please take note that different families make things differently. Some will have different sides and fixings, while others might want to add some regional fare. Thus, this list is JUST a guideline, and it is NOT complete.
Family meals are very special. They help build the family togetherness, and provide a safe place for community, family and love.
Finally, one more thing. Eating food is a social event. It is meant to be shared with friends and family. These people are the most important people in our (individual) world. Treat them special. Enjoy a fine meal with them and share the time with a fellowship of togetherness and happy discussion.
My friends Dana and John perfectly practice what the Rev. Jack King referred to as "scruffy hospitality." Their kitchen is small. The wood cabinets are dark and a few decades old. Spices and jars for sugar and flour line the countertops because there's nowhere else to put them. A tall, round table shoved in a corner has mismatched bar stools crammed around it.
The sliding glass doors in the kitchen lead to a back deck with a well-used chiminea, an outdoor table and a large variety of chairs and cushions, many of them bought at yard sales. We circle the chairs around the chiminea on weekend nights during all four seasons, whenever Dana and John put out a simple call out through text or Facebook that says, "Fire tonight!"
There will always be food, but like the bar stools and deck chairs, the food is mismatched. Our hosts provide some food; John may have the urge to make jalapeño poppers or Dana may put together some version of salsa with whatever's fresh from the garden, but there's not a formally prepared meal. Everyone just brings something. It's perfectly acceptable — encouraged even — to bring odds and ends of foods that need to get used up. I often bring wedges of cheese that have already been cut into or half a baguette to slice up and toast to dip in hummus. Everyone brings a little something to drink. And it's a glorious feast.
This kitchen and deck won't be featured in Better Homes and Gardens anytime soon, but maybe they should be. They are two of the most hospitable spaces I know. By opening up their home as-is, Dana and John are the most gracious hosts I know. I almost wrote "by opening up their home with its imperfections," but that's not accurate.
Their home is perfect — just like it is.
-Mother Nature Network
Now, to the meals…
Steak
The thing about steak is that you can get it all over the world. From Thailand, to China, to Argentina, to Singapore. It is a global meal. It’s also on the expensive side. So, most American families only eat steak on special occasions.
Typically is it grilled on an outside grill. This will be true if it is hot out like in July, or in the dead of Winter. It will also be cooked to perfection by the Man of the House.
A delicious American steak meal with baked potatoes and melted (fully salted) butter. I do love the XO/ VSOP in the glass with ice in the background. Ah, now this is what I call a fine family dinner.
There are all sorts of cuts of steak that can be chosen. My family would often cook porterhouse, T-bone or Filet Minion. Sides would often consist of corn, a salad, (baked) potatoes, and rolls.
American-style Spaghetti Meal
This is one of the most popular American family meals in America. It is cheap, easy to make, and delicious.
American style spaghetti dinner meal.
It often consists of home-made meatballs, on a spaghetti sauce that is made all day in a big tureen on the stove. Sides include salad, garlic bread, a vegetable (corn, greens, green beans, or broccoli), and (of course) graded Parmesan cheese.
Baked Lasagna
This meal is related to the spaghetti meal in that they both originated from Italian American families. Lasagna takes more work to make, and thus is not as common, though it is always very popular.
Baked Lasagna that is often served in American homes for dinner.
It’s a delicious meal that is a cross between wide noodles, meat, cheese and all sorts of spices within a very tasty delicious sauce. Oh, and it does go well with a fine bottle of wine and some nice crunchy Italian bread.
Fried Catfish
This meal is regional to the “Deep South”. It is commonly found in Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama. The fish is cut in fillets, breaded, and deep fried. It is eaten in generous quantities. Along with sides of okra, corn, picked tomatoes, Cole slaw and hush puppies (a kind of deep fried bread).
Deep fried catfish meal with a side of cole slaw and sauce.
I had no idea it existed until I moved to Mississippi. Then I immediately fell in love with it. Well, it and the “Southern style” mint sweetened iced tea.
(Baked) Friday Fish
As a Catholic, I was raised to have fish on Fridays. Thus, every Friday, without exception, we would eat fish. This changed in the 1970’s when the Catholic church embraced a more “progressive” rule to keep up with the times. Instead of eating fish, the Catholic church-goes would fill their minds with good happy and positive things.
Yeah. I’m sure it worked… for a week or two.
In general, the fish would be obtained from the frozen section in the local supermarket. Most Americans do not live on the Ocean, and thus have (out of necessity) obtain frozen deep-sea fish. (Or go fishing in the rivers and lakes.)
Baked fish done American style for a wonderful American dinner meal.
The fish would be baked in the oven, and served with a lemon squeeze. Sides would often consist of rice, asparagus, broccoli or peas.
One more thing. American fish are usually de-boned. It is a very rare thing to serve fish with the bones still in place.
Pork Roast
This is a fine wonderful meal that is generally common on the weekends because it takes some time to cook. In general, it is cooked for a long time so that the meat is tender and delicious.
American style baked pork roast.
It is often served with mashed potatoes, or rice. Sides would include salad, vegetables such as corn, green beans, and cauliflower. Bread and butter would tend to round out the meal.
Pork Chops
Pork chops are a MAJOR American love. Just about every American loves this iconic dish. (Unless you are one of those progressive Marxists that only eat tofu, and avocado milkshakes in Starbucks in the upscale sections of the American metropolis network.)
I started my first love of pork-chops when I was a toddler. My parents would often give me a bone or two to gum while I sat in the highchair. Ah. Good times. Good times.
American style pork chops meal.
it is often served with apple sauce, a salad, and some rice or scalloped potatoes. Delicious!
The first time that my Chinese wife tasted American style pork chops was in Pago Pago in American Samoa. She fell in love with the dish. She never tasted anything so absolutely delicious. In many ways it is similar to the Chinese cooked pork, but is cooked thin, almost like bacon. Yum!
A fantastic dinner plate of thin well cooked American style pork chops along with some wonderful mashed potatoes.
Baked Whole Chicken meal
Everyone, all over the world, enjoys eating chicken.
Studies have shown time and again that eating together has many benefits beyond nutritional purposes for everyone concerned, especially for our teens and tweens.
The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, New York, reported that children who eat at least five times a week with their family are at lower risk of developing poor eating habits, weight problems or alcohol and substance dependencies, and tend to perform better academically than their peers who frequently eat alone or away from home.
In addition, the more frequent teens have dinner with their parents, the more likely they are to report talking to their parents about what’s going on in their lives.
According to research by Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, teens who eat at the family table more often are more likely to show fewer signs of depression and feel that their family is more supportive, compared with teens who dine less often at home.
You are probably convinced now that having dinner together as a family is a good thing for your teens and tweens. It is, in fact, life-changing!
-Eating together helps families bond
This is a baked whole chicken meal.
It is pretty much common all over the world, though there are regional differences. My father’s mother would cook it with bacon on top in the oven. While my mother’s mother would cook it in a pan of water and cook until all the water evaporated. Leaving it crunchy on the outside but super tender inside.
It can be served with just about anything. In my family it is usually served with apple sauce, a tomato salad, rolls, and rice.
American style baked whole chicken.
Americans usually remove the head, and the feet before serving. This differs substantially from what you would find, say, in China where everything is served intact.
Turkey Meal
Of course, the Thanksgiving meal is famous around the world. Not so much for the history behind it, or the use during Thanksgiving or Christmas, but rather for the enormous size of the bird that accompanies the meal.
Cooking together as a family. There is nothing finer than including your family in things that everyone loves. Teach your children how to cook and enjoy delicious food.
The dinner table is the best place to tell stories, and kids who know their family stories are more resilient and feel better about themselves. Most inspiring are lemonade-from-lemon stories, stories about adversity where a lesson is learned, or negative events that transform into something good.
Stories help us make sense of the world, and they help kids connect to something bigger than themselves. Tell stories about yourself and other family members when they were the same age as your children. Tell stories about romance, first jobs, immigration, how names were chosen, a childhood pet, a favorite recipe or kitchen disaster.
-Parenting
Of course, in America we would have a fine central meal that would revolve around the main turkey bird. It would be a baked, roasted or cooked turkey with all the traditional fixings of mashed potatoes, coleslaw, and steamed cabbage and the like.
But, here, we are going to address the “other” turkey meals that the family eats during the rest of the week.
Hot turkey sandwich.
This can be anything from turkey soup, to hot turkey sandwiches, to turkey casseroles. In my family, we would always have hot turkey sandwiches on plain white bread with turkey gravy over everything and the rest of the vegetables as sides.
If you are very busy, a hot chicken sandwich is perhaps the simplest of meals to make. You get some frozen french fries, a bottle or can of instant chicken gravy and some chicken breasts with a loaf of white bread.
You pop the french fries in the oven.
You cook up the chicken on the skillet or in boiling water.
You microwave the gravy.
Then make sandwiches and pour the gravy over everything. Super simple, and very special. The kids will love it!
Oh, don’t forget the gravy over the french fries. It’s what completes the meal. Outstanding!
Chicken legs
This is a “stand alone meal”. It’s super easy to make, and lends itself for a quick meal for the working man, or friends to enjoy over some icy cold beers.
You just take a package of frozen chicken legs. You put it on a tray and pop it in the oven. Before you know it, you’ve got tons of baked chicken legs that you can eat with just about any side. It’s quick, fast and super easy.
Delicious American style baked chicken legs.
You can add honey, or bread crumbs or any other treatments (such as bacon) to make the taste really “pop” out. Try it.
Chicken wings
You can also cook chicken wings the same way as you cook the chicken legs. Only in America there is an added dip that is often used. It is typically dipped in Ranch or Blue Cheese salad dressing for the most wondrous taste.
Rituals like dinner, which punctuate a world that often feels frenzied and out of control, are good for adults, too. Knowing that one part of your day is going to unfold in basically the same way, day after day, is comforting.
So, I'm ringing the dinner bell and inviting you and your family to come to the table. Dinner is more than a feeding station. Food will bring the family to the table, but it's the conversation and stories that keeps us there. In an hour, you can create comfort, fun, play and meaningful conversation—one meal at a time.
- Anne K. Fishel, Ph.D., author of "Home for Dinner: Mixing Food, Fun and Conversation for a Happier Family and Healthier Kids,"
Baked American style chicken wings served with a fine ranch or blue cheese dressing for dipping.
Meat Loaf
Dinner is the best indicator of how kids will fare in adolescence. The more frequently kids eat dinner with their families, the better they do in school, and the less likely they are to become sexually active, suffer depression, get involved with drugs or alcohol, or consider suicide.
Why?
Maybe because families who eat together talk more, which helps them stay connected and build better relationships. Also, it could be because parents who show up to eat with their teens and tweens are more likely to express their love constructively in other ways, in the form of both attention and supervision.
Maybe because families who offer kids more structure are more likely to keep kids attending to their homework as well as out of trouble. Maybe because dinner transforms individual family members into a “group”, which gives parents more clout to rival the power of the peer group.
Or maybe because children, even more than the rest of us, need something to count on every day – the tangible security of belonging and being nurtured that is represented by the ritual of sharing food with those we love.
To quote clinical psychologist and parenting coach Dr Laura Markham: “Whatever the reason, family dinner is a pretty easy insurance policy to build into our home life.”
-Eating together helps families bond
There are few things as iconic as American meatloaf. It’s as American as baseball, apple pie, and keg parties. It is a rare person, indeed, who has never had a meatloaf dinner.
Very few things beat a fine delicious meatloaf dinner. In fact it is great with beer. Try it!
Meatloaf is a very simple meal that is made out of ground beef, eggs, bread and ketchup. You mix the entire mess together and pop it into the oven and let it cook. Then take it out and eat with mashed potatoes, peas and carrots and some bread. Yum!
Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese sandwich
Now, this meal isn’t so much a dinner meal as it is an iconic American lunch meal. And, make no mistake. It is iconic.
A fine and delicious, easy to prepare meal- tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches.
Among the most lasting and powerful traditions in family life is one that seems to have more influence than almost any other – the family meal. Recalling your favorite family experiences usually leads to thinking of such times as the weekly Sunday meal, family mealtimes during Thanksgiving or other holidays, or a Saturday morning breakfast with Mom or Dad.
Why are family meals so powerful?
Sharing a family meal provides an experience that touches all of our senses – sight, touch, taste, smell and listening to warm laughter or good conversation. Family meals help provide a regular, consistent opportunity to create a shared experience that is meaningful and offers a sense of belonging to all. Research has shown that regular and meaningful family meals offer a large variety of benefits to children and parents.
- The Big Benefits of Family Meals
Eating a nice bowl of tomato soup and dipping a really nice grilled cheese sandwich into the soup is a far wonderful thing to do. My memories of this most fantastic and simple meal have always been pleasant. They have been about friends and family and home.
American style tomato soup with a fine grilled cheese sandwich.
In general you cannot get a tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich outside of the household environment. So my memories are, of course, about family and friends.
Chicken Noodle Soup
Scruffy hospitality means you’re not waiting for everything in your house to be in order before you host and serve friends in your home. Scruffy hospitality means you hunger more for good conversation and serving a simple meal of what you have, not what you don’t have. Scruffy hospitality means you’re more interested in quality conversation than the impression your home or lawn makes. If we only share meals with friends when we’re excellent, we aren’t truly sharing life together.
-MNN
Now, chicken noodle soup is a global food. Heck! You can even find it in China. Though it is made slightly different. I personally like the American version and I particularly like it with chicken breast, fresh celery, and delicious large carrots cut at an angle.
Delicious chicken noodle soup with egg noodles.
We would make the soup in a large tureen on the stove, and then cook the noodles separately. (Sometimes we would cook rice.) Though, always separately. Egg noodles were always the noodles of choice. In particular Klusky’s noodles.
We would then eat it with white bread and butter.
Eggs and bacon
This meal is actually known as “bacon and eggs”. It’s a (for certain) breakfast meal, but it is so easy to make and cheap that it can be made at any time. It’s just fantastic as a dinner if need be. You just MUST makes sure that the bacon is crunchy crisp. Wimpy and fatty bacon isn’t bacon, it’s something obscene. Ugh!
A nice bacon and eggs meal showing bacon cooked properly, toast that is toasted properly and “sunny side up” eggs. Delicious!
Family meals offer the opportunity to connect with each other, communicate about family happenings, and give each other time and attention. While families are encouraged to share meals, not every meal has to be a sit-down dinner extravaganza. The most important thing about family meals is to make them frequent, fun and family-centered.
Couples or families will benefit more from family meals if they occur more frequently during the week. Typically, research suggests that more than half of families with children in the United States share a meal five or more times a week. A concern, however, is that 30 percent to 35 percent of families often eat less than three meals a week together, which means less time for connecting and communicating. Changes in family life, such as the increase in dual-earner families and the rise in single-parent families, may make eating together frequently more difficult for families. Families, however, should try to set aside regular and consistent family meal opportunities to eat together as often as possible.
Fun also is part of the recipe for a happy family mealtime. Parents and other adults should try to avoid making mealtime a disciplinary occasion when children are reprimanded or given lectures. Instead, save such conversations for a time away from the dinner table, and focus instead on being together in a positive way.
A family-centered mealtime means limiting distractions, especially the TV or computer. Turn such things off at mealtime and use strategies to engage each family member in conversation.
- The Big Benefits of Family Meals
Enjoy the time with your children. Teach them the joys of cooking, as well as the fun of eating together. Make it fun. Make games of food prep. make planning meals and buying groceries and adventure. Teach them budgets planning and how to select things at a grocery sore. Show them how different spices work together. You can do this!–
Eating “Mexican”
Now, I do hope that no one is offended. But, you know, I didn’t have my first burrito and taco until after I left the Navy.
I had no idea how delicious Mexican food was until later when I was training for my role within MAJestic at the China Lake Naval Weapons Center outside of Ridgecrest, California. There, I fell in love with a restaurant chain known as “Del Taco”. Later on, when in Corpus Christi, Texas I ended up getting my first tastes of authentic Mexican food.
I never looked back.
A wonderful and delicious burrito with sides of rice, refried beans and a mysterious but delicious salad.
Now there are so many different kinds of “Mexican food”, that it would take a complete website to even start to list them all. For now, just realize that, for me, we would just (in general) say “let’s eat Mexican”. And we would go procure some refried beans (don’t know how to make ours from scratch), some wraps, salsa, and make up burritos or taquitos.
Tacos and fixins’
In a more traditional Spanish, Mexican or SA (Spanish-American) family, the meals are communal with multiple plates where a person can build and construct their own dinner creations. There might be a plate of cut up tomatoes, one of peppers, a bowl of rice, and one of ground beef, and another bowl of cut up lettuce.
These meals are all very easy to make and fun to eat, not to mention very delicious.
A fine Mexican themed spread for the family.
“Families should be encouraged to make the family meal more of a priority and to try to have at least four family meals per week. It is often easiest for families to eat dinner together, but other mealtimes work as well. Meals can be simple with shared mealtime responsibility among family members.
Teaching children the enjoyment of cooking and having them involved in mealtime preparation develop skills they can use for a lifetime. Shared meals can also be extended to friends and neighbors to build a stronger sense of community and help with meal preparation.
… Regular family meals are key components of family life that may make a difference in the lives of children and parents.”
-Story, M., and Neumark-Sztainer, D. A perspective on family meals: Do they matter? Nutrition Today, 40 (6), 261-266; 2005 .
Oh, and don’t forget the special corn spread that make eating an ear of corn, super special!!!
Mexican corn spread for eating the corn in a very special delicious way.
“Backyard” Hamburgers
Of course, you can always get a hamburger at any millions of chain fast food restaurants. But we are not talking about that here. We are talking about the family ritual of making home-made hamburgers for family consumption.
Fine delicious home-cooked and home-grilled hamburgers in the back yard is a staple of American family life.
Making your own hamburgers is very American. It’s a tradition and it is reserved for special occasions. In other words, it’s not a typical dinner meal. Instead it is a meal that is used to meals with extended-family and friends. Thus, it is usually cooked and takes place on weekends and holidays.
Home made – backyard grilled – hamburgers do not resemble fast food hamburgers. They are completely different all together.
You know, hamburgers are not a typical American dinner meal. They are reserved for lunches or other special occasions. However, when the occasion calls for it, home-made hamburgers just cannot be beat. Go “home style” nothing else ever comes close.
Hotdogs (With Sauerkraut)
This is a very simple but unique meal. You simply buy a package of hotdogs and a can of sauerkraut. You put the hotdogs in the bottom of a pan, and cover them with the can of sauerkraut. They cook easily and quickly. Then for dinner you eat kraut-dogs with mustard and perhaps horseradish.
This is a very simple but unique meal. You simply buy a package of hotdogs and a can of sauerkraut.
If you have young kids, nothing will make them happier than a meal of hotdogs. You know, you don’t need to have baked beans with it, but if you wanted to you could add some black beans, and some cut up onions as well. Make it a special meal. Your family will love you for it.
Kraut-dog with fine delicious mustard. Your kids would love you for this wonderful meal. You can serve scalloped potatoes, potato salad or corn. Oh, and don’t forget the beer. Make sure it is icy and chilled.
If you’re not into health or family, consider that eating home-cooked meals is also cheaper.
A sample estimate finds that a family of 4 could save nearly $40 a week, per person, by simply shifting meals into the house. You’ll be saving money while your kid is getting Bs and not picking up a drug habit. That’s a win all around.
But the best part about getting together for dinner is that it becomes ingrained in a family’s tradition if you start the habit early. While eating with a little kid may feel chaotic and not very beneficial, know that every dinner at the table removes you even further from a dystopian hellscape. And that can only be a good thing.
-Fatherly
Sauerkraut gets a bad rap! Condiments for hot dogs go deep and wide, but generally sauerkraut gets overlooked. Is it preparation, is it the word “sauer” gets misconstrued?
“Home made” Pizza
Yes. Pizza is not a normal dinner meal. That is, of course, except when it is a home-made, home style pizza. Oh yeah baby!
What to do when your 8-year old nephew comes to visit? Make pizza, of course! It’s not just eating dinner that can be a social event, but also cooking the dinner can be an adventure as well.
My mother, God bless her soul, bought me a cookbook when I was younger, and one of the first things that I did was learn how to make pizzas from scratch.
I experimented on the bread dough. I experimented on the sauce. I experimented on the cheese and the toppings. I even discovered that broccoli (cut up very fine and added to the sauce) was an amazing complement to a fine well-made home-style pizza.
Making real pizzeria style pizza at home has always been very tough to do. The reason has been it’s not possible to get a home oven to the same temperature as a commercial pizza oven, but that doesn’t matter. There are all sorts of tricks to make really delicious pizzas using a normal typical household stove.
Oh, do what we do in my family. We make the dough, the sauce and the topping and freeze them. Then pull them out and allow them to defrost and throw together a really quick meal. Delicious.
Roast Mutton
When I first had kids, I ended up entertaining a lot less, partly because of the mess in the house that I no longer had time to deal with.
Then one day, a woman I very much admired said something so simple. She said whenever someone was coming to her home — a home with five children in it — and she started to worry about how her home looked, she would stop and think: "Are they coming to see me, or are they coming to see my home?" It occurred to her that someone who would have a problem with her home looking like a family of seven lived in it wasn't really someone's opinion she cared about.
I'd love to say I embraced that wisdom immediately, but I didn't. Slowly, though, I have let go of some of the crazy things I believed must happen before people entered my front door. The first thing I let go was the upstairs. Over the years, I've became more relaxed.
Next, I didn't dust. Nobody said a word, and they came back again.
I didn't plan the entire meal around foods I could prepare ahead of time so my kitchen could be spotless when my guests arrived. Friends jumped in the kitchen and helped me finish making dinner, and we had fun.
-Mother Nature Network
Mutton? Yes, you bet. No, it’s not an overly common meat in the United States. When I was growing up, we ate i maybe about four times a year. But still, it’s a find meat and lends itself to some very delicious meals.
Delicious lamb chops. It’s outrageously delicious. Ask the butcher to trim the fat cap (the thick sheet of fat on the outside of each rack) but to leave a thin layer of fat. Some butchers like to “French” the ribs, trimming away the meat between the rib ends to leave the bone exposed, but this meat is tasty and should be left in place. Ask the butcher to cut between the ribs to make a total of 16 single-rib chops.
One of the most important things any dad can do for his kids is to show up for dinner. It really is that simple.
Research from the Journal of Adolescent Healthshows that the more frequent the family dinners, the higher the positive impact they have. “When clients ask me what the most important aspect of family meals are I answer, ‘Making them happen!’” says pediatric dietitian Melanie Silverman. “These meals provide the structure and sense of community that young children need and crave during their development.”
The benefits are well documented.
First, there’s the educational component. Research published in New Directions for Child and Adolescent Developmentfound that mealtime conversation boosts vocabulary even more than books. According to the findings, children between the ages of three and five learned some 1,000 rare words at the dinner table compared to the 143 rare words from parents reading storybooks aloud.
-Fatherly
Curried mutton over rice. This simple meal was one of my favorites growing up as a child. My mother would make it and give us some chutney to add as a topping to it. I loved it.
Pigs in a blanket (Stuffed Cabbage)
This is a very common “American” food, even though it originated outside of the States. Most American families have learned how to make this tasty and delicious meal. Being from Pittsburgh, everyone made and ate this most wonderful of foods.
No summer cookout is complete without a tray of stuffed cabbages! Tender cabbage leaves stuffed with rice, seasoned ground meats and a rich tomato sauce make this the perfect summer comfort food. Plus these freeze beautifully!
This dish, God this dish brings back so many childhood memories that I literally sat here for 30 minutes in a daze just remembering some of them. Like there was the time we were harvesting cabbages from our garden and we each got to pick a single plant that we were in charge of to take care of. Whoever grew the biggest cabbage won. The prize was Mom would cook our favorite dessert to go with her famous stuffed cabbages. That summer I ended up winning. This cabbage was so huge that I couldn’t lift it. I know I have a picture of me trying to hold it on my lap. I’ll dig it out to share the pic once my arm is better.
Then there are the countless memories where our kitchen was soooooooooooooo hot (we didn’t have AC growing up and we only had window fans) and Mom had 3 large canning pots on the stove with boiling water making hundreds of stuffed cabbages. I can still remember that hot cabbage smell and hot/wet air in the kitchen. Dad would use the tongs to pull out the leaves, put them in the colander and my Mom, sister and I would each trim the stems.
- Mom’s Classic Stuffed Cabbage Rolls
Where I come from Pigs in a Blanket are cabbage rolls stuffed with rice and meat. You may also know them Halupkies. Traditionally these cabbage leaves are stuffed with rice and ground pork, beef or a combination of both meats.
Pittsburgh, a melting pot of nationalities, drew a large percentage of its population from Central European, Eastern European, and Balkan countries, and those influences can be seen in local cuisines that are still popular today. One traditional dish that has remained popular over the last century and is still a staple at many Pittsburgh area dinner tables is the famous stuffed cabbage.
The stuffed cabbage roll (also known as pigs in a blanket) is a dish consisting of a mixture of beef, rice, and seasonings, hand wrapped in cooked cabbage leaves, and topped with a tomato sauce. Many in the area still refer to the “hunky handgranades” by their ethinic names: Golabki (Poland), Holubky (Czech Republic and Slovakia), Golubtsy (Russia) Balandėliai (Lithuania) , Halubcy (Belarus), Holubtsi (Ukraine).
-Conrad Catering
Yeah, I know that this is a regional from from Pittsburgh, but this is my blog and I am the one writing this. If you don’t like it, then you can write your own blog.
I happen to like these stuffed cabbage rolls, and yes, they are referred to a “pigs in a blanket”, not the hotdogs wrapped in the Pillsbury instant roll dough.
Now depending on where you grew up or even what your background is you either called these Stuffed Cabbages, Pigs in a Blanket or Halupkies. The only real ingredient difference I’ve found between these is the use of either all beef or the omittance of rice and usage of potatoes instead.
Hey! And here’s a recipe for you all. See how easy it is to make!
Pigs In A Blanket (cabbage rolls) #SundaySupper
Oh and while I am at it, let’s take a look at how families work… the division of labor and how you can eat delicious meals all the time and not be stressed out over it. Yes, there is a way.
It’s called having a “traditional conservative family“, as opposed to a “progressive modern contemporaneous family”. You can read my propaganda on this issue and the importance in parenting and family budgeting. The link below opens up in a separate tab for later reading for you all.
Hey! If you love your children enough. Spend TIME with them. You can always make more money, but you can never make more time.
Stuffed peppers
This meal is similar to the stuffed cabbage, only they are stuffed in peppers and use a slightly different mix of spices. Never the less, they too are easy to make and super delicious.
Stuffed Bell Peppers are easy to make and everyone loves them! We fill these with a mixture of beef and sausage but you can use one or the other (or even ground turkey if you prefer) and I sometimes replace the rice with Cauliflower Rice. While I used green peppers in this recipe, any color bell pepper (red/yellow/orange) will work just fine.
When choosing the color of pepper for your Stuffed Peppers recipe, it will depend on your personal taste preference. Green peppers are a bit more zesty and definitely less sweet than red, yellow or orange. Green peppers in this recipe really compliment the flavors in the beef, sausage, tomato-rice mixture.
One of the cool things with many home-made American foods is that they lend themselves to batch creation, and then freezing for later for a quick and easy delicious healthy family sit-down meal.
“The truth is that our weeknights are pretty packed with sports practice, piano lessons, and homework, along with what can seem like the never-ending demands of my job,” says Sun Basket’s executive chef, Justine Kelly.
“It’s challenging, but I make a point to have dinner with my daughter every night. Also, one thing we always make time for is Sunday supper at my sister’s house. My parents come and my daughter gets to spend time with her cousins. It’s a highlight of our week.”
-Fatherly
There are few things finer than spending time with family and food. You can spend it with friends and pets as well. The smells, the creativity, and the environment together is far better than a movie, or a video game. Food and friendships equal paradise. make sure that you get your children involved early on.
Yes, you definitely can freeze
Stuffed Peppers and they are a great make-ahead meal! You will need to
bake them first, then you can either freeze them individually or
together in a baking dish. To re-heat, simply thaw in the fridge
overnight and bake in a 350°F oven until heated through.
Delicious and wonderful city chicken being cooked on a skillet. It’s a fine and wonderful meal that is cheap, easy to make and delicious. It also goes great with just about any vegetable side dish. Oh, and do not forget the nice frosty beer.
If you grew up in the North or Midwest regions of the country, you may be familiar with a dish called City Chicken, either as a mainstay in your weeknight supper rotations or a favorite comfort food.
For many people it is a mystery. No one ever really understands what it was, why it had that name, and why they couldn’t find any recipes for it in cookbooks.
You won’t find a recipe for City Chicken in the poultry section of a cookbook because, well, it isn’t poultry.
Known as a Depression Era recipe, cubes of veal and pork are threaded onto a skewer in order to create a faux drumstick. Seasoned and breaded, then fried or baked, this was a popular and delicious way to “fake” a poultry dinner.
I love this photo. Cooking in the kitchen with friends and family. The dinner meal is an ideal opportunity for friends and family to get together and share fun, talk and drink.
But why would you have to fake chicken?
Prior to the 1940’s, everyone wanted a chicken on the dinner table, yet surprisingly it was very expensive, even more so than pork and veal. Thus, we have the invention of “fake” chicken. Also known by the more common name of “city chicken”.
With roots in both Pittsburgh and Cleveland, where Polish and Ukrainian immigrant communities have strong presences (and found more scarcely in other Great Lakes-area cities like Detroit and Buffalo), city chicken got its start in the Depression era, when chicken was scarce and more expensive. Made then with pork, veal, or a combination of the two, the meats were cubed and then threaded onto skewers, then breaded to create a drumstick-like shape to better resemble chicken.
-Eater
Delicious city chicken. It goes great with rice, mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, or a fine spinach or maybe some cabbage. Oh, and don’t you dare forget that nice icy beer. Eh?
Spend time with friends.
Eat well.
Talk, laugh. Drink.
Enjoy your moments together.
Hygge is the idea that helps Denmark regularly rate as one of the happiest countries in the world — Danes have regularly been some of the most joyful in the world for over 40 years that the U.S. has been studying them — despite long, dark winters.
Loosely translated at "togetherness," and "coziness," though it's not a physical state, it's a mental one. According to VisitDenmark (the country's official tourism site): "The warm glow of candlelight is hygge. Friends and family — that’s hygge too. And let’s not forget the eating and drinking — preferably sitting around the table for hours on end discussing the big and small things in life." Hygge's high season is winter, and Christmas lights, candles galore, and other manifestations of warmth and light, including warm alcoholic beverages, are key to the concept.
Still a little confused and wondering how you could cultivate hygge in your life? This Danish NPR commenter sums up some specifics: "Hygge is a deep sense of cosy that can originate from many different sources. Here is a good example from my life : a cloudy winter Sunday morning at the country house, fire in the stove and 20 candles lit to dispel the gloom. My husband, puppy and I curled up on our sheepskins wearing felt slippers, warm snuggly clothes and hands clasped around hot mugs of tea. A full day ahead with long walks on the cold beach, back for pancake lunch, reading, more snuggling, etc.
This is a very hyggligt day." Now that sounds do-able, doesn't it?
- 7 cultural concepts we don't have in the U.S.
A fine young budding master chef. Check out all the things he is learning. Check out that he is in the kitchen with family. Check out how intent he is on what he is doing. Not only that! But, he will be able to eat his creation. How absolutely wonderful!
Chili
Ah. Chili. My mother always would make a big stiff tureen of chili on the stove in the Winter. Then when anyone would come over to visit, we would make up a fresh pot of coffee and give them a bowl of chili and some rice.
Delicious and wonderful home cooked, home made, chili with love. It is one of the most popular American foods and can be found all over the United States. You can find chili in California, in Texas, and in Massachusetts. Chili is a very popular meal that also lends itself to other meals as well.
Over the years I have developed my very own versions of this simple and delicious food. In fact, it is super easy to make in China. You just use a Hunan spice packet for the Chili mix.
In general, I like to eat it over white rice. Though, I do have friends that prefer Doritos, or other kinds of chips. They also like to add graded yellow or cheddar cheese on top. While I like to crunch up saltines and cheese. I will tell you what, it is fantastic with icy cold beer. It is a fantastic meal.
Delicious and wonderful home cooked, home made, chili with love. It is one of the most popular American foods and can be found all over the United States. You can find chili in California, in Texas, and in Massachusetts. Chili is a very popular meal that also lends itself to other meals as well. Oh, and never forget that chili goes good with an icy cold beer. Make sure that the chili is hot, and the beer is cold. For it is a cold bowl of chili when love let’s you down. Don’t you know.
Oh, and you can also have fresh ears of corn on the side, maybe a salad or even Oreo cookies if you would like.
“When adults are talking, putting their napkins in their laps, and eating a variety of foods, they are teaching the young children at the table how to be human,” says Silverman.
“Meals are a multi-sensory classroom with emotional, physical, and developmental benefits.” The most important part of the puzzle? To simply make family meal-time happen.
-Fatherly
Chili can be made using a wide range of ingredients. You can even make an all vegetarian chili if you wish. Personally, I just can’t see the point. As humans are carnivorous creatures as designed by God. But there you have it. If you want to do your thang – go ahead. I’m not judging. Just saying.
Stuffed Pork-chops
You know that pork-chops are great. How about stuffed pork-chops? OMG!
The chops are typically made with pork chops that are 1 1/4- to 2-inches thick. Look for chops that are already secured with twine or toothpicks that prevent the stuffing from falling out. All you have to do is pick them up, bring them home and preheat your oven or grill to cook up delicious stuffed pork chops. Baked or Roasted Stuffed Pork Chops.
-How to Cook Stuffed Pork Chops From a Grocery Store
It’s exactly like you would expect. It’s a thicker cut of pork chops. Only you slice the chops and in that slice you stuff it with stuff. Usually, right out of the (store bought) box of stuffing.
Who doesn’t like pork? Well, aside from the religious, and those on the fringe? Savory and delicious tasty home made American-style pork chops. It’s a very easy and delicious meal that anyone can make.
This is a nice little meal that I discovered while I was in High School. A girl that I was handing out with at the time introduced me to a little “hole in the wall” establishment off a side street in Butler, PA. I immediately fell in love with them.
You know the type of place—where the big loud guy behind the counter works fast and furious, takes your order (you better know what you want!) and barks back “Sausage, Peppers, and Onions!” to the guys on the line, and within minutes you have a huge roll in your hands, loaded with more sausage and peppers with onions than you think you can possibly eat.
But eat you do, because that sausage and peppers with onions are so so good. And then you have a food coma for the rest of the afternoon, and you eat steamed broccoli for dinner because after that lunch, you just don’t need much for dinner. Yum!
Here is a most delicious Italian sausage meal. The sausage is slow cooked in a crock pot for four hours or so with Italian spaghetti sauce, some peppers and onions, and then removed and placed on a freshly baked hard roll. It i a most excellent family lunch, but makes a wonder dinner when paired with a bowl of creamy soup. Yum!
Funny thing, though. My mother never made them. She did not like sweet Italian sausages. She never could see the point of it. Why buy sweet Italian sausages when you could buy kielbasi instead?
Well, I disagreed. I happen to love this meal.
What Kind of Sausage and Peppers to Use?
This dish is typically made with a several different colors of bell peppers—usually one green, one red, and one either yellow, orange, or purple. That said, use whatever color bell peppers you like! If you don’t like a color, skip it and just use more of another color.
As for sausages, in this recipe we are using a combination of sweet and hot Italian sausages, but if you want a milder dish, use only the sweet sausages and reduce the amount of chili pepper flakes in the recipe. Likewise, if you would like it spicier, use all hot sausages and/or bump up the amount of chili pepper flakes.
How to Store, Keep, and Freeze
Once cooked, the sausage, peppers, and onions will easily keep for 3 to 4 days in the fridge, but you can also freeze it for up to 3 months. Just defrost it in the fridge overnight and reheat in a saucepan over low heat, or pop it in a saucepan with a little bit of water or oil, over low heat, until completely warmed through.
-simplyrecipes.com
A very fantastic and tasty Italian sausage sandwich on a fine fresh hard crunchy roll and is best served hot. You do want to drink and wash it down with a nice icy beer. A local beer is always best. Don’t you know.
Four Steps to Make the Most of a Meal
Being there may be the most important part of family meal-time, but there are still a few things you can do to make the conversation all the more fruitful.
1. Have a ritual.
Answer the same question every evening when you sit down to eat to give your kid something to prepare for and see how the answers shift over time with their changing perspective. A few examples: “What are you thankful for?” or “What were the peak (best part) and pit (worst part) of your day?”
2. Play games.
Challenge your kids and encourage fun and creativity by asking them questions like, “What were the three craziest things you saw today?” or “If you were an animal, which would you want to be and why?”
3. Skip the TV dinner.
Do your best to turn off the TV, put phones away, and negate any distractions that can take away from your time to talk. “Family meals should be pleasant, fun, and technology free to optimize the experience,” Silverman says.
4. Get everyone involved.
This is a time where the whole family chips in to come together. Ask your kids to wash veggies or set the table. “I’m a big fan of teaching children to cook,” Silverman says. “Their own home kitchen is the perfect place to start learning how to prepare healthy meals.” One of the easiest ways to teach them skills in the kitchen is for them to try their hand (with adult supervision) at one of the healthy, ready-to-make meals from Sun Basket.
-Fatherly
Such a satisfying combo! Italian sausages cooked with bell peppers, sweet onions, crushed tomatoes, and garlic. Served on a hoagie roll or over pasta or polenta. Mmmmm. Mmmmm. Mmmmm. Sausage and peppers with onions. This is one of those classic Italian-American street food, lunch cart dishes.
Oh, yes. Do not forget.
Food cooked, is food to eat. Don’t stand there yapping! Make yourself a sandwich and pour yourself a beer. have a good time you all!
Another fine example of a home-made-Italian sausage sandwich. I’ll bet you won’ be able to get this in a fast food restaurant.
Beef Tips and Rice
And no, it’s not Chinese.
This is one of those wonderful meals that I will always treasure. For some reason, and I do not know why, I always remember the relaxing time after I ate this meal. When we are all sitting at the table talking and enjoying our after-dinner coffee in demitasse cups..
Delicious and wonderful beef tips and rice. The perfect meal for a fine active household. It actually goes great with iced tea. Did you know that?
Around the south, just about all the local mom-and-pop style
restaurants feature Beef Tips with Rice and Gravy on their menu. It’s
an old diner favorite that is also usually one of the cheaper menu
choices because it can take a somewhat tougher cut of beef, slow simmer
it to make it tender and, then serve it up with a large portion of rice
and gray to cut costs.
Some people like to eat the beef tips and rice in a soup bowl, or a shallow bowl. I, myself, think that a fine dinner plate is the best. But, it’s all up to you all.
Its so versatile in that it tastes great when served over rice, over mashed potatoes or, even over noodles.
Busy family hints...
Here’s a really simple recipe that just needs about an hour to slow simmer before its ready to serve. You can take advantage of some cheaper cuts of beef anytime you find them on sale and, whip up some great Southern comfort food that can be served with rice, mashed potatoes or even noodles. It’s your choice.
Stew beef works very well for this recipe or, you can use eye of round steak like we did. You can even go all out and make it with a finer cut like Ribeye steak. The really great part is, whatever you find on sale, can probably be used to make our Beef Tips. Buy it while its on sale, freeze it and have it ready for a quick and easy lunch, dinner or Sunday dinner. I think you’ll like it about any time of the day.
-Taste of Southern
It certainly looks like a Chinese dish. Perhaps it is because many Chinese dishes follow the same formula. Except that they use a different sauce, different selection of spices and a different cut of meat. Thus this dish is a uniquely American dish and it is deserving of your attention as a wonderful entree to provide to your friends and family.
Salisbury steak
For the longest time my mother would make Salisbury steaks and they would be tough. They would be chewy and needed to be cut into tiny cubes to digest.
Then, I met a girl from Zambia.
Again, it might seem like this Salisbury steak meal is Chinese. But no. It’s not. It’s as American as Football cheer-leading squads and Saturday nights in the GTO. It’s different in that the gravy, the meat and the way of cooking the meal differs substantially from what is present in China. That’s neither good nor bad, it’s just the way it is. Live the difference!
When we lived together, she was able to make the most delicious Salisbury steaks that I have ever eaten. They were nothing sort of amazing. She said that there was nothing to it, but I disagree. Some people just have a natural affinity and skill at certain things, and she was just amazing in the kitchen.
"One of the simplest and most effective ways for parents to be engaged in their teens' lives is by having frequent family dinners,"
- Joseph Califano Jr., chairman and president of The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA).
Salisbury steak can be served on a bed of rice, or with noodles. Heck, you can even serve it with potatoes, whether mashed or in any of the other delicious forms possible.
You might wonder just how a family can afford all this. Well, it’s no mystery. You can EASILY afford these meals provided you set your familial household to operate traditionally. It’s not at all what is promoted in the mainstream media, and perhaps it’s time to take a good hard long look at the assumptions that our parents made, and the sacrifices they made to become “progressive” and “enlightened”.
You can click on the link below. It opens up into a new fresh tab so that your browsing in this article will not be interrupted.
Shepard’s Pie
Now my first experience with “Shepard’s Pie” was in the school cafeteria. My mother tended not to make it at home. She felt that it was too simple a dish to make. More plebeian, I would guess.
A fine Shepard’s pie. Nope. You will not find this in a fast food restaurant. Though, you could possibly discover it in a British or Irish pub.
Old Fashioned Chicken and Dumplings is a family favorite meal that is both comforting and delicious! Chicken and dumplings is a dish that consists of a chicken cooked in water, with the resulting chicken broth being used to cook the dumplings by boiling. A dumpling—in this context—is a biscuit dough, which is a mixture of flour, shortening, and liquid. The dumplings are either rolled out flat, dropped or formed into a ball.
Chicken and Dumplings. A fine, fine American meal.
This chicken and dumplings recipe is created from scratch including the tender dumplings and juicy chicken in an easy homemade broth. Combine chicken, onion, carrots and celery in a large pot. Season to taste.
EATING AT HOME SAVES MONEY.
In 2007, the average household spent $3,465 on meals at home, and $2,668 on meals away from home, according to the national Consumer Expenditure Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Per meal, that’s about $8 per meal outside of the home, and only about $4.50 per each meal made in your own kitchen.
- 9 Scientifically Proven Reasons to Eat Dinner as a Family
Potatoes with onions and eggs
Eating family dinners is associated with healthy dietary food patterns. A 2000 survey found that the nine to 14-year-olds who ate dinner with their families most frequently consumed more fruits and vegetables and less soda and fried foods. Their diets also had higher amounts of many key nutrients, like calcium, iron, and fiber. Matthew W. Gillman, MD, the survey’s lead researcher, noted that family dinners allow for both "discussions of nutrition [and] provision of healthful foods."
- 9 Scientifically Proven Reasons to Eat Dinner as a Family
This meal is representative of a very simple meal that I once cooked for a friend. She had to work and we offered to baby-sit her kids for her. The thing was that the poor kids weren’t eating right. They didn’t eat all day. And there was nothing in the kitchen. I mean, the entire kitchen was empty except for some onions, potatoes and a few eggs.
Here’s what you do.
Potatoes and onions, a very fast and super cheap meal to make in a pinch.
You cut up the potatoes and the onions. Put in in a skillet with salt, pepper and butter. let it cook. The house will be filled with this wondrous aroma. Then you remove the potatoes and onions. And cook the eggs int he same pan. The kids will love it.
Meals need not be expensive. You just need to be a little creative.
Round Steak
Easy Crock Pot Round Steak recipe is quick to throw together, cooks all
day and produces a delicious beef and gravy dinner waiting for you when
you get home.
A fine and delicious round steak. There are so many ways to cook this steak. It is up to the family cook to pick one and see how it turns out. In any event, this meal is most certainly a pleaser. Everyone will enjoy the meal.
As my parents were partially of Polish decent and from Pittsburgh, the idea of eating perogies was as natural as learning how to put on socks. We all ate this most wonderful of meals.
Though my relatives always made perogies out of meats, vegetables and fruits, personally I never got a chance to eat the sweet versions. My siblings and my cousins always gobbled up the fruit versions. Leaving me with the more “unpopular” perogies.
A perogie is a Polish-American version of a Chinese dumpling. Only it is often filled with mashed potatoes, and cheese, and fried with onions in the Shanghai style.
No worries though. They now have ballooned up to the size of whales. While I have maintained my thin and trim lines. LOL.
Ravioli is a traditional Italian pasta dish made by stuffing rounds or squares of pasta dough with a filling, creating a sort of pasta “pillow.”.
Ravioli is a traditional Italian pasta dish made by stuffing rounds or squares of pasta dough with a filling, creating a sort of pasta "pillow.". The dish is wildly popular outside of Italy, and can be readily found in fresh and frozen form in most Western supermarkets.
-Wise Geek
Ravioli is a traditional Italian pasta dish made by stuffing rounds or squares of pasta dough with a filling, creating a sort of pasta “pillow.”. The dish is popular outside of Italy, and can be readily found in fresh and frozen form in most Western supermarkets.
Beef Stroganoff
Beef Stroganoff. My mother used to make this with egg noodles. As did all my aunties. It’s a Pittsburgh thing, I guess.
This wonderful meal consists of juicy beef smothered in a creamy mushroom and onion gravy. Beef Stroganoff is a crowd favourite that tastes like a slow cooked stew but is on the table in 30 minutes! Beef Stroganoff – a timeless retro classic!!
Beef Stroganoff. Juicy beef smothered in a creamy mushroom and onion gravy. Beef Stroganoff is a crowd favorite that tastes like a slow cooked stew but is on the table in 30 minutes! Beef Stroganoff – a timeless retro classic!!
If you have a demanding job, finding time to eat with your family may actually leave you feeling less stressed. In 2008, researchers at Brigham Young University conducted a study of IBM employees and found that sitting down to a family meal helped working moms reduce the tension and strain from long hours at the office.
- 9 Scientifically Proven Reasons to Eat Dinner as a Family
Cold-cut Spread
This isn’t really a dinner so much as it is a tradition. What we would do at my mother’s family and with her parents and relatives would be to have a “cold cut spread”. It’s just simply a layout allowing the person to make their own sandwiches at will.
This is also known as a “cold platter”. It is a very cheap and easy way to make a meal spread without any cooking.
Sandwich spreads are some of the best make ahead meals. When your family is in and out of the house, eating at different times and with different appetites, having these delicious and nutritious spreads in the fridge is like money in the bank. And make-ahead sandwich spreads are the perfect answer to feeding your family when it’s just too hot to cook.
Turkey, ham and salami cold cuts are all at home on a sandwich—but these deli meats can be used in many other ways. We like to add thin strips of salami to pasta carbonara and cheesy frittata, smoked turkey to spaghetti and thinly-sliced chicken to spinach salad. One of our favorite deli meats is high quality pastrami—there are few sandwiches more delicious (or iconic) than a Reuben. Piled high on rye bread with Swiss cheese, sauerkraut and Russian dressing, it’s a New York deli classic.
The average restaurant meal has as much as 60% more calories than a homemade meal. Combine the fact that portions served in restaurants are continuing to expand with that fact that when we’re presented with more food, we’re more likely to eat more food, and it becomes clear that eating at home is simply healthier. When families eat together, young children are less likely to be overweight or obese because these children are eat regular, nutritious, home cooked meals, and also help in making or serving those meals.
- 9 Scientifically Proven Reasons to Eat Dinner as a Family
Sausage and (Hominy) Grits
A favorite of my mother. She would routinely cook this meal on every Tuesday once she settled into retirement. It’s a thing that she loved to do, but which I had no inking of why.
This is a full meal ready to go. The underrated hominy takes in the flavor of the roasted sausages; spinach cooked with garlic and chili flakes makes a perfect green addition to the plate. Seconds, please!
Research examining 5,000 teenagers has shown that when children eat with their parents regularly, they are more likely to be emotionally strong and have better mental health.
Teens who ate regular family meals were also more likely to be adjusted, have good manners and communication skills.
This effect is not restricted to the children - mothers who ate with their families often were also found to be happier and less stressed as compared to mothers who did not.
- 9 Scientifically Proven Reasons to Eat Dinner as a Family
Kielbasa
Nothing says Pittsburgh better than Kielbasa.
Polish kielbasa is traditionally made from ground pork. Some commercial variations of kielbasa are made from ground turkey, but these aren’t authentic. Garlic, along with pimentos and ground cloves, are the predominant seasonings.
What sets kielbasa apart from other members of the sausage family is its coarse texture, heady garlic flavor and classic Polish preparation – it’s traditionally not smoked or lightly smoked at best. Smoked sausage, on the other hand, is cooked and then smoked. Often, artificial smoke “flavors” are added as well. Because they’re fully cooked, you can eat smoked sausages cold or warmed. Other varieties include Italian mortadella, Cajun andouille, German bratwurst, bologna and hot dogs. Smoked sausage can be made from ground pork, turkey, beef or a combination of meats — and they can include any variation of seasonings.
Serve kielbasa warm, grilled or boiled, along with other traditional Polish sides such as pierogies — potato dumplings — pickled cucumbers and buckwheat groats. You can also cook kielbasa with eggs, use it for sandwiches, include in soups, stews and casseroles or serve with a side of vegetables.
Gumbo
Nothing says Southern Louisiana food like gumbo: A thick stew-like soup of meat, okra, and Creole and Cajun seasonings. But its history—and even its essential ingredients and method of preparation—is widely disputed.
A most delicious seafood gumbo. This is the food of New Iberia, you all. It is outstanding and wonderful. You have not lived until you have eaten some seafood gumbo.
Historians generally agree that its existence is first documented at the beginning of the 19th century. And the thickeners commonly used in many gumbo recipes (filé powder, okra, and gumbo roux—don’t worry, we explain all of these) give clues to its Choctaw Native American, West African, and French roots.
Regardless of its disputed origins and the myriad ways it’s prepared, it’s an essential, treasured part of New Orleans, Louisiana Creole and Cajun culture, and we’re here to break it down for you: what gumbo is, what ingredients to use, and how to make different types, from sausage to chicken to seafood gumbo.
Gumbo is a stew popular in the U.S. state of Louisiana, and is the official state cuisine. Gumbo consists primarily of a strongly-flavored stock, meat or shellfish, a thickener, and what Louisianians call the "Holy Trinity" of vegetables, namely celery, bell peppers, and onions. Gumbo is often categorized by the type of thickener used, whether okra or filé powder.
-Wikipedia
A most excellent dish, seafood gumbo has the makings of great times. All you need to do is add friends, beer and some fine music. Just bring yourself. And… of course… be yourself.
While both gumbo and jambalaya are mainstays of Cajun and Creole cooking, they’re both distinct dishes with different methods of prep. While gumbo is typically enjoyed as a rich, flavorful soup, sometimes served spooned over rice, jambalaya is similar to Spanish paella:
The rice is usually cooked with the protein (usually some mix of chicken, seafood, and/or sausage) along with the stock, seasonings, and veggies in one large ready-to-serve skillet. Creole Jambalaya may include tomatoes, while Cajun typically does not.
Studies have proven that there’s a significant link between family dinners and academic performance.
A report by CASA found that teens who have between five and seven family dinners per week were twice as likely to report receiving mostly A’s and B’s in school, compared to those teens who have fewer than three family dinners per week.
In addition, only 9% of teens who ate frequently with their families did poorly in school, according to the report.
- 9 Scientifically Proven Reasons to Eat Dinner as a Family
Many people would eat Gumbo as a stand alone dish, I would prefer to eat it as a soup with a fine sandwich nearby (and an icy beer). I have a write up or post about this. It is below. You can click on it and it will open up in another tab so that this article can be finished.
Hey! Here’s a great bowl of gumbo. Wouldn’t you just love to have one yourself?
A bowl of fine delicious gumbo with shrimp and okra. Yum!
Gumbo is usually distinguished by what is used to thicken
it—typically okra, filé powder, a roux, or some combination of the
three. The name “gumbo” is also speculated to come from the name of the
traditional bases: either from the word kingombo, a West African Bantu
word for okra, or from kombo, the Choctaw Native American word for filé
powder, an essential spice.
Filé powder: Filé
powder is dried crushed leaves from Sassafras, a plant native to the
Southeastern U.S. The powder is usually added at the end of the recipe
to thicken and season the gumbo and can usually be found in a
well-stocked supermarket or spice store.
Okra:
Used either fresh or dried, okra is one of the most common thickening
agents of gumbo and gives it its distinctive taste and flavor—it’d be
difficult to find a recipe for gumbo that doesn’t make copious use of
okra. Traditionally, when okra is out of season, dried okra can be used
instead.
Shrimp and okra gumbo, showing and illustrating how the okra is to be cut and added to this fine, and tasty gumbo dish.
Roux: Derived from French cooking, gumbo roux is much darker than the mildly toasted roux used in classical French cuisine. It’s made by toasting flour in fat such as butter until it’s golden brown, but many gumbo roux recipes call for a roux that is “chocolate-colored,” “mahogany,” or even “close to burnt”, and they’re typically made with oil instead of butter.
Some gumbo roux that can be obtained off the internet. Thus providing delicious Gumbo just about anywhere in the world.
“Holy Trinity”: Similar to mirepoix, (carrot, onion,
and celery) the “Holy Trinity” is the base of much of Creole and Cajun
cooking—bell pepper, onions, and celery is used to start many gumbo
recipes. Depending on the recipe, shallots, garlic, and parsley can also
be included in this essential blend.
The Trinity that is used in Gumbo.
Oh my Goodness! This is a long post!
I am so, so very sorry. However, I will have to wrap up this post leaving out so many, many delicious dinner suggestions.
For the purposes of brevity, let’s tack on the following as “honorable mentions”. All of which are delicious and deserving of their own place in the spot-light.
Clam bake
Cobb Salad
Baked Ham
Oyster Stew
Deviled Crabs
Deviled eggs
Pulled Chicken
Lox and bagels
Shrimp
Jambalaya
Baked Turkey
Family participation. Cooked and served with love and attention. No television. No cell phones. No games. No apps. Just people.
Conclusion
Talking. Eating. Being together. What’s not to love?
Eating meals together has the potential to strengthen family bonds as it provides a daily time for the whole family to be together.
For younger children, routine family meals can provide a sense of security and a feeling of belonging in the family.
Older children and teenagers, too, prefer eating together as a family. In a recent Columbia University study, 71% of teenagers said they consider talking, catching-up, and spending time with family members as the best part of family dinners.
- 9 Scientifically Proven Reasons to Eat Dinner as a Family
Meals are to be shared. Share some food with others. It’s not expensive, but the time and the friendships are the most valuable things that you can have. Share your food. Share your time. Share your life.
With others.
This kitchen may not be picture-perfect, but it’s the perfect place for an authentic evening. (Special tanks to the Mother Nature Network).
A life lived alone is a life unlived.
Meals are to be shared. Share some food with others. It’s not expensive, but the time and the friendships are the most valuable things that you can have. Share your food. Share your time. Share your life.
Oh, yeah!
A family DOES NOT NEED two incomes. Nothing, and I do mean NOTHING, is more important than spending time together. Live cheaper. Live frugally. Spend more time together. One person budgets and tends to the family. The other member labors and gives everything to the family. This system works.
Give it a whirl. You might be surprised how well it works out.
For you other expats out there…
This post is designed for you to show your relatives what “American food” is, and what it is not.
This is NOT American food…
All Americans have eaten a McDonald’s meal, but fast food is not family meal fare. It is not healthy and does not lend itself for communal meals and togetherness.
American “fast food” is a progressive invention to assist the “modern enlightened” person to cope in a stress-filled automated reality where the needs of the group come before the needs of the individual.
Tired of having to work two jobs to make ends meet. Well welcome to the new modern progressive reality ushered in by Wilson and FDR.
Background Links
Here are some links on related subjects that covers this specific subject in much more detail.
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are
some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you
might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up
in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society
within communist China. As there are some really stark differences
between the two.
More Posts about Life
I have
broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones
actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little
different, in subtle ways.
Funny Pictures
Be the Rufus – Tales of Everyday Heroism.
Articles & Links
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find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
About this photo splash. This is a scene from the classic 1980's movie "Better off Dead". Hey!, you know, if it's too hot outside, or it's raining, today might be a great opportunity to call some friends over, get a couple of cases of beer, and order some pizza and watch this grand old classic. What do ya think?
But first… speaking of the 1980’s classic movie… here’s a noteworthy review…
Hey! Try this. You go into a restaurant where everyone is waiting for a table. Than, when things are kind of quiet, say very loudly “I WANT MY TWO DOLLARS!”
I guarantee that you will find other fans of this crazy movie, and get into some interesting conversations, and maybe… just maybe make some nice new friends in the process. Try it…
Let’s continue forward, shall we…
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Shenzhen Dogs
Seriously, the dogs of Shenzhen are treated quite differently than any where else on the planet. I don’t really know why, though I do have some (worthy of discussion) theories.
Now, most people reading this will not have a clue as to what is Shenzhen, or where it is. That’s understandable, given what the American media has devolved into. But it need not be difficult. Shenzhen is the Chinese city next to Hong Kong. It is like this…
Here is the map of Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Shenzhen has 14 million citizens, and Hong Kong only has 8 million people. To put that into perspective, New York city has 6 million people. There is a constant flow of people in and out of HK though SZ. As many people who live and work in Hong Kong, actually have homes and residences inside Shenzhen.
Shenzhen is a very young city, and many people, before they have children will adopt dogs as pets. (And cats too. But, here we are talking about dogs.)
As such, Chinese culture enables them to treat their pets very specially. This can manifest as wearing clothes, hairdos, nail treatments, massages, and all sorts of special dog treats and toys. Now some have taken the more drastic steps in treating them like children, even training them to walk up right.
As this video attests…
I’ve got a ton load of movies of Shenzhen dogs. If you want me to post more of them, just send me a note. And, I’ll make up a complete post only on Chinese dogs.
Migrating Fish…
It’s tough being a fish. I don’t know what the story is on this, but it sure is interesting. Why are they taking this road? And, where do they expect to go to? Ah. It’s all a big mystery.
Oh, and a special message to the jack-off trolls. No, this is not photo-shopped. Why waste your time trying to convince me otherwise?
Passing the class…
It is tough being in a meritocracy. You have to get the best grades and do your best or else you WILL be begging in the streets. It’s the Chinese way.
China has the yearly exam that determines the fate for millions of students. This exam covers everything, and does not award “diversity points” to “balance the score” in favor of protected classes of people like corrupt nations do.
Well, this is no big deal to me, but to a first time visitor, it makes a great impression. Shanghai is a modern, cutting-edge, beautiful Chinese city with large Western influences. If I would be so bold, I would say it is perhaps one of the most beautiful, cleanest, and most diverse cities on the planet. Most certainly better than London, Paris, or New York.
Today, if you want to graduate from the university and get into Banking or Finance, you migrate to Shanghai. It’s the odd man out that would instead go to Los Angeles, or Chicago to start a banking career.
Personally, while the Bund (the river with a nice wide walking boardwalk) is nice, I myself prefer the old city and the tight streets, the cool and interesting buildings, and the fine delicious night food that seems to be everywhere.
Rural Swimming Hole
This could be just about anywhere in Asia. Though, to me it looks a lot like Thailand or Vietnam. Water-holes and swimming areas are a natural environment that should be protected and cherished.
Whether it is a swimming hole, or a tree-house in an apple tree, people need to go forth and be out in nature. Oh, and by the way, don’t forget your friends, your pets, and some delicious food and drink. Icy cold beer is always a pleaser. Make sure that you remember to bring a bottle opener if you go the glass-bottle route.
I well remember how, in the 1960’s and the 1970’s, many (if not all) of the waterholes and ponds in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana were being filled in, or paved over for “safety”. Oh, you know, “for the children”. Yet, was any children actually ever hurt? Nope. Just an excuse used by the timid and fearful to control others…
If you can take your grandchildren, or children, or friends to a watering hole in the United States, then you should consider yourself lucky and truly fortunate. These gems are becoming rarer with each passing day.
In the mean time, spend more time outdoors and spend time with the people that mean things to you. Life is far too short not to.
I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single
post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of
the videos in this post, please continue…
If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.
Links about China
Here are
some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader,
might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.
China and America Comparisons
As an
American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United
States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.
The Chinese Business KTV Experience
This is
the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the
British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal
press. This is the reality. Read or not.
Learning About China
Who
doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what
China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in
China.
Contemporaneous Chinese Music
This is a
series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It
is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I
am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series
of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and
enjoyment.
Parks in China
The parks
in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very
mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.
Really Strange China
Here are
some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem
odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events,
while others are just representative of the differences in culture.
What is China like?
The
purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world,
outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they
might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank
you.
And while
America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources,
and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has
done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and
you can see this in their day-to-day lives.
Summer in Asia
Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
We continue with our exploration of Asia though videos.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Nice Lunch in the Mountains.
If you live in any of the mountainous regions inside China, this is pretty much what lunchtime might look like. You would sit at a table on the side of a cliff face, and look down on the clouds that surround you.
You have to keep in mind that MOST of China is mountainous. All you need do is look at a relief map of China.
This is a relief map of China. You can pretty much see that most of China is very mountainous.
If you lived in and around these mountains, your lunch might look a little something like this…
The Inside of a KTV
Yeah. This is all pretty much what it looks like. This is the hallway in some generic KTV somewhere in China.
Of course, I have a large series of posts about KTV’s and in particular Business KTV’s that you might want to take a stroll looking into after this post is finished. In any event, all KTV’s are pretty awesome and are decorated “to the hilt”. They all look a little like this…
The Interior of a Subway Car
Subway travel is very common in Asia, and currently you can travel to all of the first, second and third tier cities in China using it. Here is the view inside of one of the cars. Here, as is quite common, the rail leaves the tunnels and travels above ground like a monorail would.
Chinese Stewardess Training
All Chinese flight attendants, stewards and stewardesses, are also trained to fight (you do know that Muslim extremist behaviors is not taken lightly by China), and provide medical service when necessary.
One of the things that they are also trained to do is to fly a plane. In the event that the cabin crew becomes incapacitated, the stewardess can fill in and fly the plane if need be.
Let’s continue forward, shall we…
If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.
Links about China
Here are
some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader,
might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.
China and America Comparisons
As an
American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United
States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.
The Chinese Business KTV Experience
This is
the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the
British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal
press. This is the reality. Read or not.
Learning About China
Who
doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what
China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in
China.
Contemporaneous Chinese Music
This is a
series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It
is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I
am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series
of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and
enjoyment.
Parks in China
The parks
in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very
mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.
Really Strange China
Here are
some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem
odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events,
while others are just representative of the differences in culture.
What is China like?
The
purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world,
outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they
might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank
you.
And while
America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources,
and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has
done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and
you can see this in their day-to-day lives.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
Here we discuss how to manage a family household. We show that it is really a very easy thing to do. However, there are rules and roles that MUST be followed for it work perfectly.
Unfortunately today, this is considered to be something that everyone knows how to do automatically. It is not taught. It is not carried down from parent to child. It is just considered to be unimportant. Therefore, very few people know how to really manage a household.
As such there is a dearth of practical information on this subject.
In well run and well-managed households, people follow rules and take their roles seriously. This picture, and this article describes a traditional conservative household arrangement.
The information herein describes how to manage, and run, a family household in the traditional manner. Here, we discuss the importance of roles, rules, and responsibilities. Also known as “the three “r’s” of family happiness.
Introduction and Summary
There are two ways to manage a household. They are;
Progressive. There are no rules. There are no roles. There are no responsibilities. Everyone does their “own thing”.
Traditional. Managed with fixed roles, set rules and firm responsibilities.
There are NO other ways to manage a household. Partial, or experimental rules are always temporary. Unless there are strong and fixed rules, any familial management is progressive. Or to put it in another way, if you do not have roles and rules, you are running the household progressively.
In the 1960 and 1970s, most people had a traditional family. In a traditional family, the husband works, and gives all of his earning to the wife. The wife in turn, budgets the money, provides fresh and healthy meals, makes sure that the house is clean, and that everyone is happy. She is in charge of the education of the children, and supervises it and runs off to the school if anything does not pass her muster.
Special important note
While there are some similarity between political usage of this nomenclature, the relationship ends there. There are many politically progressive social liberals that maintain traditional conservative households. For instance, Bill Clinton, Barrack Obama, and Joe Kennedy. They all have very progressive liberal political interests, however they all run and manage their households in a traditional conservative manner.
While many American political personalities are staunchly progressive liberal, their home life is often quite conservative and traditional. In the case above, we have former President Obama washing the dishes after a family dinner in his household.
Historical background
America was founded upon and used traditional household management techniques from the very beginning. This served Americans well. It was a time-honored method with centuries of success. Everyone ran their families in the traditional manner. From the immigrants from South America to the American Indians, to the European Settlers. Everyone managed their families using the traditional model.
The single dwelling, single family house has been a stable of American society for many, many decades. This is what most young couples dreamed of someday owning.
In the traditional model, the man of the house would be the “bread winner”. He would go out and work. He would bring home his earnings and give all of it to his wife. She, in turn, would budget the money for the family. She would handle all domestic issues, the house, the family, the education, the meals and the clothing. Thus freeing up the man to concentrate on one solitary thing; making more money.
It worked well.
Then, around 1913, some new progressive ideas started to take hold of society. This included the Federal Income Tax, the Federal Reserve, and all the “modern progressive” lifestyles.
Here is a small group of girls dressing like men in the 1920’s. they are wearing boy’s knickers, ties and men’s attire. It was so very shocking at the time.
Women and girls started to smoke, wear men’s clothes and flaunt promiscuity. Traditionalists were shocked and tried to downplay these behaviors. But they gained popular attention and were popularized by Hollywood, thus making the progressive lifestyle mainstream.
These ideas were such that rules, roles, and responsibilities would be rejected in favor of a new and improved way of managing families. That is to say, one that has no rules, no roles, and no responsibilities.
In the 1920’s, it became popular to become a flashy “flapper”. This was a name that was coined by the rubber overshoes that the girls would wear at the time. They wouldn’t button them secure, and thus they would “flap” back and forth as the flappers walked.
This festered in tiny pockets in urban areas up until the 1960’s where it began to become popular due to the need for both parents to work to support the family. (It’s fundamentally due to the rise of inflation caused by federal mismanagement of the US dollar. But that is a discussion for another time.)
The 1970’s saw wide-scale implementation of progressive family management. Which was pretty much management of nothing, using no rules, no roles, and no responsibility. It was kicked off by the SJW Feminist movement in the 1970’s which pretty much put the “kill shot” into traditional family management, and family longevity.
Don’t believe me? Facts don’t lie.
This
is a chart of the divorce rate in the United States over time. You can
clearly see that the SJW feminist movement during the 1970’s played a
major role in the divorce rate in America and the reduction on parental
education for the children. This was coincidentally ALSO the time when
the majority of American households migrated away from traditional
conservative family arrangements to progressive arrangements wither
there are no rule, no role, and no responsibilities. What is truly sad
about this is that most Americans today, having been raised in families
after 1975, have no idea how wonderful a traditional conservative family
arrangement could be.
Today, the vast bulk of families manage using the progressive model. There are no roles, no rules, and few (if any) responsibilities. The rare hold-outs are traditionalists that can be found outside the mainstream society.
That is why you will find many people eating fast food for lunch, the rise of poor food choices, and the increase in obesity. That is why most families need to have two incomes. As no one is able to budget on one income.
Here, this post discusses how to run a family using the traditional model. And yes, do so today, in the heavily taxed, stressful, reality that the United States is today.
America has changed substantially in many, many ways from what it was first established as. Traditionalists, and conservatives lament these changes. While progressive socialists embrace the changes.
The Two Roles
In a traditionally managed household, there are two main roles. These are absolute and defined roles with ZERO shared responsibilities.
The “Man of the House”. He is the figurehead, and the “leader” of the home. He is the sole earner of the family. He gives 100% of his earnings to the family. His job is primarily towards earning money, maintaining household related equipment and repairs, and discipline.
The “Housewife”. She is totally responsible for the household budget, investment, savings, and all things financial. She is responsible to see that the household is clean, in good care, and that all domestic issues are taken cared for. She selects, chooses, budgets and handles all clothing and food choices for the family. It is her responsibly to make sure that the children are well behaved and being good in school.
In a well-run household, the wife would tell the man what to wear. She would select his clothing. Laying out his work clothes for the day, and his “house clothes” for him (with slippers) when he gets home from work.
Contrary to the progressive narrative, house clothes and slippers are a functional way to keep the house clean. Often the man would work dirty and filthy factory jobs. He would need to strip off his dirty and filthy attire before the housewife would ever let him put a step in the house.
Which has led to such things as basement bathrooms (in Pittsburgh) and "Mud Rooms".
The housewife is responsible for all domestic affairs. This includes the house, the clothing, the food, and the children. She is totally and completely responsible for it all. To assist, she might ask her husband to behave in certain ways, or assist at times, but she is ultimately the person in full control of the domestic environment.
The wife is responsible for good, nutritious meals that are both healthy and tasty. She is responsible for the behavior of the children and teaching them about their roles in the family, in the community, and in society. She is also responsible for their spiritual and moral development.
"After three years of happy marriage, and getting stressed out by her job in a busy payroll department, she decided in 2018 to turn back time — and live like a 1950s housewife.
That’s when Holte, 30, transformed her Hillsboro, Oregon, home into a suburban shrine to the pre-ERA era, busying herself cleaning, making dresses using vintage patterns — and getting dinner on the table by the time her husband, Lars, 28, gets home from his job as an engineering manager.
“I feel like I’m living how I always wanted to. It’s my dream life and my husband shares my vision,” she says as a vinyl Doris Day soundtrack plays in the background. “It is a lot of work. I do tons of dishes, laundry and ironing, but I love it and it’s helping to take care of my husband and that makes me really happy.”
- The woman quits her job to spoil her husband like a 1950s housewife
The man, on the other hand MUST make and earn money. He must not fail at this task. If the housewife says that there isn’t enough money in the budget, then he must plan on how to bring more money in BY HIMSELF. It is his responsibility.
When the household is in good hand, well maintained, and budgeted for, the man can relax. he can concentrate in earning money for the family. There is an old saying “Behind every successful man is a strong woman.” That is very, very true.
When the husband and the wife are working together as a team, there is nothing that they cannot resolve. The man, unencumbered by day to day squabbles and strife, can best work and plan on making more money to improve the family lifestyle.
The Main Rules
One of the characteristics of a traditional family is that there are rules associated with roles. Each role will have a set of rules associated with it.
Here is a scene from the Hollywood comedy titled “THE STEPFORD WIVES”. It makes a parody of the traditional family and ridicules it. In this scene the housewife gets all excited that the food that she purchases for the children is new and improved. In real life, most housewives would provide healthier selections of food for the children.
Roles with rules are fundamental to the operation of any organization. It’s much like in a hospital. The janitor cleans the floor. The nurse attends to the day to day needs of the patients, the doctor makes medical diagnoses, and the patient just lies on the bed and concentrates on getting well.
The rules for the “Man of the House” are…
Earn money.
Give all the money to the housewife to budget.
Represent the family in appearance, action, and behavior.
Repair and maintain things as needed.
Maintain and discipline the children as needed.
Assist in the education of the children as advised by the wife.
Enforce rules.
The housewife will place limits on televisions, iphone, and electronic media. She will determine the amount of time allocated in recreation, chores, and study. She will be responsible of the care and behaviors of the children. It will not be automatic. It is learned, and it is up to the mother to teach this.
The rules for the “Housewife” are…
Budget the money.
Create numerous savings accounts.
Maintain and keep the household, clean, tidy and presentable.
Cook, and plan fine delicious and healthy meals.
Make sure that everyone is well attired with clean clothes.
Maintain a “warm hearth”; a household free of stress.
Represent the family in the community, church, and society.
Teach the children.
One of the most important roles of a family is to maintain a good standing in the community. Both the man and the woman cultivate this role. However, the woman makes and takes special care that the local organizations are represented and cultivated. That way the family gains social standing in the community that can aid and support the family in times of trouble and distress.
God forbid I go into someplace like Harbor Freight with a big wad of cash.
Yeah, give me a sec and I’ll back right up to the front door to making loading all this crap I don’t need into the back of my rig easier.
This is why the Wifely Unit takes care of the money around here. I’m horrible about that shit . That is why our bills get paid on time and why I now actually have a killer credit score.
-Busted Knuckles
Characteristics of a Traditionally Managed Family household
You might find the following characteristics within a traditional conservative household…
Savings to cover any emergency.
Cleaned and ironed clothes.
Toothbrushes replaced bi-monthly.
Trim and fit family members.
Formal sit-down meals.
Well tended yard.
“His” chair.
“Her” bathroom.
House shoes (slippers) beside the front door.
A pantry that is full. (A consequence of budgeting.)
Well behaved, and respectful, children.
Hours where the kitchen is “closed” from use.
A lack of dirty dishes. (The sink is always clean and spotless.)
Formal sit-down dinner meals.
Rules about smart-phone use in the house.
A fully stocked refrigerator.
One of the characteristics of a conservatively run traditional household is a well-stocked refrigerator. It is by far the easiest way to determine if the household is run progressively or in a traditional manner. A full stocked refrigerator is a consequence of budgeting. The housewife will buy healthy delicious fruits, meats and vegetables. Then use them to prepare very cost-effective meals. Progressively run households do not have the time, the inclination, or the routines to maintain this kind of quality life.
Some things that a Progressive Liberal family cannot do
If a family falls into the progressive liberal “trap”, often out of necessity, they will have a difficult time. They will be unable to enforce any type of traditional conservative family rules. It’s simple really. When people live a life without rules, they resent any rules when they are put in place. It’s human nature.
Thus, here are some things that progressive liberal families have to
struggle with. Traditional conservative families won’t experience these
problems.
The things that progressive liberal families have trouble with include…
Formal dinners at dinner time. Most progressive
liberal families have a very difficult time with this. They find it
difficult to set aside time and have difficulty in getting everyone to
recognize the importance of communal dinners. When they do manage to set
time aside, it is often short, and the experience becomes a mere
formality. It is never a daily event.
Chores and roles.
Progressive liberal families are disgusted by roles and greatly resent
taking on any kind of responsibility. they have a very negative view of
any kind of male or female role and avoid it where at all possible. As a
result, the household tends to become cluttered, messy, dirty, and
disheveled.
Saving Money. Most progressive
liberal families have an understanding that what a person earns is
theirs to do with they wish. Thus it is very difficult for them to save
money. Especially saving money for family purposes.
Discipline.
When children are raised in a progressive Liberal household; one where
there are no rules, the children become unruly and directionless. They
often develop emotional and behavioral issues. This becomes a burden to
the rest of the family.
Some good links
I have numerous other posts specifically related to this subject. If you enjoyed this article, then you might find the other articles quite interesting and enlightening. Please click on any of the links. They will open up into another tab on your browser.
In addition, I have some thoughts on some “tools” that might be beneficial to the wife and husband…
Here is a post that might help the housewife balance the family budget when the income source drops from a two-person income to that of a singular wage-earner…
Conclusion
There are two ways of managing a family. You can manage either progressively, or traditionally. If you want to manage traditionally, you will need to take on a completely different mind-set. In the long run you will be healthier and happier, but the adjustment might be painful for some.
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.
Posts about the Changes in America
America is going through a period of change. Change is good… that is, after it occurs. Often however, there are large periods of discomfort as the period of adjustment takes place. Here are some posts that discuss this issue.
More Posts about Life
I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.
Articles & Links
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
You can go all over the internet and find all sorts of advice on how to keep your love and life alive. Here is mine. I argue, quite convincingly, I must add, that happiness can be had by any couple that enjoys fine food and drink.
There is an old saying that goes a little like this…
“The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”
Oh, it might not be all that popular in today’s progressive reality of gender-less, role-less, lifestyle. But it is a very strong truth. If you want to keep a family strong, tight, and together, make sure that everyone is fed with delicious home-cooked delicious food.
You know, there is something very special about home-cooked, home-made food. Now, certainly, it all doesn’t have to be made from scratch. What is important is the care and attention that goes into the food preparation. Then, once the meal is made, it can be shared together with your loved ones at a table.
In traditional conservative households, the meal is the MOST important event of the day. It is a time where family members can relax, talk about their day and life. It is a time where you can share experiences, stories, laugh, cry and just have fun all within a safe protective environment. The most important caretaker of this ritual is the housewife. For she is the rock, the anchor from the the family revolves around.
Let everyone else play their games on their phones. Let them grab a burger at the local drive through. Let them steal bites while they are playing a game on the computer or watching the news. That is their life. Not yours. You and your loved ones can enjoy a meal together in peace.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, keeps a family together than delicious food shared together without interruption.
After nearly fifty years of traditional housewife bashing by Hollywood, and the mainstream media, the idea of traditional roles and life is frowned upon as a throw-back to “The Handmaids Tale”. Well this article is the rare, rare push-back to that well known and well-understood narrative. It describes the joys of delicious food, and praises those rare special people who put all their heart and energy into cooking delicious nutritious foods for their loved ones.
The meal
The most important meal, is of course, dinner. But here, we are going to concentrate on the second most important meal. Lunch.
And, of course, this entire article implies that the family members will somehow work out an arrangement whereas they can share a mid-noon meal together (and if possible) a siesta afterwards. It’s not always possible in today’s world. However, with some planning and preparation, it can be part of your life as well.
Of course, there are many meals that can be used for lunch.
I like steak and wine myself, but here we will concentrate on the most fundamental of American meals; the delicious soup, sandwich and icy cold beer. Ah, who doesn’t like beer? Who doesn’t like a thick and hearty delicious soup? And, for goodness sakes, who doesn’t enjoy a wonderful well prepared sandwich?
I met a few on the internet. They are ugly sad souls indeed.
Pepperoni pizza grilled cheese sandwich with homemade tomato soup. When my Mrs makes this up for me, I get all twitter-pated towards her. She goes to all this effort, and it is so very delicious. Such care and attention, what a wonder! Food is a way for people can express their love for each other.
Now, you do not need to make the soup from scratch.
Many times, the Mrs. would simply get a can of Campbell’s (creamy) soup, add milk or creme instead of water, and thicken it up with cheese and crunched up crackers. Oh, I so do love a thick soup. Especially something like creme of broccoli or celery.
I never really appreciated thick hearty creme soups until I was well into my 30’s. But, once I was bitten, I couldn’t get enough of this wondrous, tasty and delicious food.
Campbell’s soup can be obtained in China. However the American favorites aren’t all that popular. Instead, other favors are more popular like Borst, and clam chowder. The wife loves to take the can and embellishes upon it. Like adding rice to tomato soup, or thickening the creme soups into hearty delicious masterpieces.
Now, buying fresh bread is pretty hit and miss here in China. If possible, we will buy a loaf of fresh french or Italian bread if possible, and then use it. However, many times we are stuck with the various flavors of sliced white bread.
No matter. The creative can certainly work out a great sandwich out of it. It could be a “Dagwood” with everything, to a simple grilled cheese. No matter what, I personally enjoy all sandwiches with a tomato somewhere hiding between the layers of meat and cheese.
A bowl of delicious creme of broccoli soup. I love to eat it “extra” thick with yellow cheese (cheddar) and saltines. It is so hearty and very, very tasty. You can make it from scratch, oh the person who can do this is a master chef indeed. Or you can “cheat” and use an embellished can of commercially available soup.
Delicious Soups and Sandwiches
I think that it is a shame that many people in the United States today has forgotten the importance of soup and sandwiches made “home style”. Americans have grown up to accept high-caloric fast food alternatives as the preferred ways and means to enjoy lunches.
Most of the food that you can buy at a diner can be made at home for a mere fraction of the cost. It enable you to save money, and yet provide home-cooked, delicious foods for you and your loved ones, made exactly how you all like them. When you are saving such money, you often do not NEED to have a second source of income to support your accustomed lifestyle.
By eating healthy, with carefully prepared meals by those that you love and trust, you can not only lose weight, but eat better and spend quality time together. Gals, listen to me. No man will leave a woman who is a fantastic cook. We’d have to be out of our mind.
Seriously. Name one man who does not like to eat. Name one.
Of course, that’s coming from a traditional old stogie like myself. I cannot tell you what Justin Berber, Bill Clinton, or Ellen DeGeneres would do.
My wife constantly surprises me. She has made an all vegetable sandwich for me, and I could not tell that there wasn’t any meat in it. Seriously. All the vegetables were cooked. It was so very delicious, and she used just the right amount of seasoning as well. Amazing!
There are so many ways to make the soup and sandwich meal special. Personally, I think that tomato selection plays an important role. I also think that the selection of the type of onions (if you use them) are critical. Red onions taste differently than white or yellow onions.
The bread selection is important. Potato bread makes for great grilled sandwiches with melted cheese, but the Italian and French loaves with big air pockets add a special kind of taste that really emphasizes the meats.
Thin sliced roast beef with cheeses condiments and sliced rye bread for sandwiches. Careful budgeting, and control of the budget has enabled housewives over the centuries to provide delicious and tasty healthy meals for their families. By careful budgeting, the household can be eating wonderful, carefully prepared nutritious meals every single day. The children would love to come home for lunch instead of eating the government-approved Michelle-Obama lunch menus.
There are so very many ways to make sandwiches. You can go all vegetarian, or go lean on the meats, and go heavy on the delicious vegetables. You can lightly cook the vegetables, and melt cheese. You can add eggs, tuna, sausage, meat spreads, peanut butter, or just anything that you heart desires. Let the chef of the house decide. You will not be disappointed.
I suppose that everyone has their own tastes when it comes to sauces. I have taken to using a oil and mayonnaise mix with a tad of yellow mustard on most sandwiches, but the wife loves to mix it up with blue-cheese dressing, and such exotic (for here in China, at least) such things as French, Russian and Thousand Island dressing.
Plain old mayonnaise or Miracle Whip can make even a bad sandwich serviceable. But with a little extra work, that mayo can be great. Consider mixing in any of the following concoctions:
Pesto mayo (Tablespoon of pesto per half cup of mayo)
Curry mayo (1/2 tablespoon of curry powder per half cup)
Fry sauce (ketchup and mayo)
Thousand island (French dressing, pickle relish, mayo)
Sriracha hot sauce mayo (Sriracha to taste, plus mayo)
Brown mustard mayo (2 tablespoons per half cup)
Mayo and cajun seasoning (Teaspoon per half cup)
-WikiHow
I wouldn’t even know how to get started making this wonderful Polish meal, but my wife would. She seems to know just about everything when it comes to cooking. I could find a picture on the internet, and she would busy herself trying to replicate it for me. That is awesome!
Primal Urges
Being fed well,as well as all the care that goes in the preparation of food is primal. It is our most basic of human instincts. From the moment we are born, we associate love, nurturing, care and concern with food. The nourishment that we get from our mothers makes a lasting impression on us, and shapes who we are today.
These primal urges stay with us all our life.
It impacts our interests, our relationships with family and loved ones. It determines the kind of occupation we would have, and our security within that occupation. In fact, if I were to be so bold, it is how we are cared for by our parents, most especially our mother, that determines how well adjusted we will be as an adult, and how substantive our relationships would be.
You need to understand that guys are simple. When we want a sandwich, we make one from what ever is on hand, then we eat it. Very little care and concern goes into it. However, a woman is quite different. She knows how to make special and wholesome delicious food. She will take the time to pick the ingredients. She will take the time to trim and prepare the meal. She will make the meal perfect. Those little details will keep her man running to her everyday without fail.
Food, and nutrition, was provided to us from our loved ones at our earliest age. It is encoded in our genetic makeup to love those that serve, feed and nurture us. It is this nature, this most basic and primal of biological urges, that the traditional family structure is based upon.
The mother, the primary source of nutrition, love, and education, of the children would be responsible for their well being. The husband of the house would go forth and earn, provide, and support the family. Given the contentious history of the world, he would also protect it and defend it from others.
Then after a tough day, he would come home. He would give all of his earning to his wife who would use the money, budget it, invest it, and use it for the family. As such, he would find the hearth warm. The children happy, and relaxed. He would find a delicious meal waiting for him, and a loving family that appreciates him. Know your history.
People, you cannot replace a delicious home-cooked meal by a careful, loving housewife with a restaurant meal. You simply cannot. Where can you obtain this kind of burger? Only at home, by a careful, and cost conscious, nutrition minded housewife. Why do you think that everyone was so thin in America prior to the 1970’s? Why? I’ll tell you why. They ate healthy well-cared for and planned delicious meals made by someone with love. That is why. Not the pig-trough dishes heavy on fats, starches, and GMO’s, not to mention the piles of sugar, currently served in restaurants all over the USA. The well-meaning, but ignorant progressives seriously messed up the nation. You can see the damage everywhere. All you need to do is know your history and look around.
This all being said, let’s get back to the matter at hand. That is delicious food and wondrous icy cold beer.
It’s the Details that make the difference
I argue that when a loving wife makes up a carefully prepared meal for her man, that he appreciates it far more that he is able to tell her. No, this is not some scene from Jackie Gleason, or All in the Family. This is the real world, not some kind of Hollywood fantasy.
Men, I do not care who or where, appreciate food. They appreciate how it is made. They appreciate how it tastes. They appreciate the care and concern that goes into it. they appreciate the love and affection. Indeed, when a wife takes the time to prepare food for her family; her children, and her man, it is a special time.
It always has been.
America has changed substantially in many, many ways from what it was first established as. Traditionalists, and conservatives lament these changes. While progressive socialists embrace the changes. They love the idea of there not being any genders, no rules, no roles. They enjoy the idea where everyone is equal. Anyone who disagrees with them are deplorable Nazi’s. So they say. Meanwhile, us “normal’s” just live our life. Nod our head, and say to ourselves “oh, they’ll find out. Eventually.”
That goes double if there is a nice table spread set forth before the man. I will tell you, it is hard to turn your back on any woman who lays out an excellent table spread. Who treats her man as the king of the house. Who lays out a great table cloth, with sliced bread and butter, fine tasty food, an a icy cold beverage, and then joins the man for conversation.
One of the things that my wife likes to do for me is to make sure that my beer is frosty cold. She not only gets the glass pre-chilled, but she takes ices cubes and smashes them with a hammer into slivers, and then fills the glass with them. The beer is then poured into the icy glass for me to enjoy. Listen people, ain’t no other woman, in this entire world, would take the time or give the attention to ME than my wife does. That is one of the very many, many special things about her.
A grilled cheese sandwich is easy to make, and there are all sorts of ways to make it special. Like adding some peppers, or ham, or maybe a tomato, or some garlic inside. It’s all up to the housewife. Oh, and by the way, show your appreciation for the time, the effort, and the care that was taken to make these most delicious works of art. She would really appreciate it.
When you come across a woman who is smart, attractive and so detail minded for her man and her family, you would be an absolute fool to leave her. You know, people change over time. Your body changes, you put on weight. You get white hair, and things start to sag. But you know what, it is that forever level of attention that keep us guys coming back for more.
The Importance of a Strong Wife
I cannot state just how important it is to have a fine, caring and loving wife waiting for you when you come home from work. This isn’t the 1950’s where one you obtained a job, you were set for life. Today in America you can be hired and fired at will with zero notice. As such the bosses treat you like shit because they know that you cannot do anything about it.
And they WILL treat you like shit. Everything from being berated in front of your peers in a meeting, to getting a 360 degree review, to looking at his watch when it is time for you to leave for home. Men, real men, do not take this kind of abuse. But in America, the nation of Beta-males, do.
Oh, yeah. The world is a rough place. We’ve got megalomaniac bosses, HR with rules and regulations thicker than an old telephone book, and all sorts of requirements from blood drives, to free-overtime.
But you know what, when I come home, and my wife treats me like a king… well… I feel like I can take on the world for MY FAMILY. It’s like the character Uriah Heep. His home was his castle…literally. (There was even a rock group named after him. Remember the song “Easy Livin’?)
Uriah Heep – Easy Livin’Uriah Heep are an English rock band formed in London in 1969. It has had the same lineup since 2013: lead and rhythm guitarist Mick Box, keyboardist Phil Lanzon, lead vocalist Bernie Shaw, drummer Russell Gilbrook and bassist Davey Rimmer. Of the current lineup, Box is the only remaining original member. Throughout many lineup changes, the band has included many notable musicians, such as vocalists David Byron, John Lawton, John Sloman, Peter Goalby and Steff Fontaine, bassists Gary Thain, Trevor Bolder, John Wetton, Bob Daisley and John Jowitt, drummers Nigel Olsson, Lee Kerslake and Chris Slade, and keyboardists Ken Hensley and John Sinclair.
A real man, comes home to a genuine wife who treats him like a king.
I think that all men appreciate a good caring, loving woman. I think that he would be crazy not to. And even though Hollywood, and the mainstream media has ridiculed the traditional lifestyle to the point where it isn’t even considered, it is the ONLY household arrangement that has lasted for thousands of years and transcends cultures.
It is NOT a scene from the science fiction movie “The Handmaids Tale”. This reality has NEVER existed. Though with all the relentless media hype it sure seems lit it must have somewhere… but nah. It never did.
The science fiction movie titled “The Handmaids Tale” depicted women in traditional conservative roles as mindless zombie robots manipulated to do the bidding of the males in the community. It is a truly horrific movie and served the feminist movement in the United States quite well though promotion of a nonsensical narrative.
Listen up! You can say this or that, but the fact remains.
All men appreciate a good, caring woman is one who is an excellent cook. While there are all kinds of people, I have found that those women who love their family go out of their way to provide for them in the best way that they know how.
People, there is a bond that is strengthened over food.
The entire family appreciates a wife that can cook and cook well. We look forward to her creations and love to spend the time at the dinner table with her.
Of course, not everyone wants to recognize this fact.
There are, however, those who have lived in dysfunctional families, progressive families, or neutral-gender families that all tend to be very confused about roles and responsibilities.
They don’t apply themselves to their relations, and relationships. They feel that they don’t need to do so. They believe that roles are restrictive. They feel that responsibilities stifle their freedom. They believe that anyone who isn’t as open-minded and progressive as them are manipulated waifs that need to be liberated.
Instead they have their head in the clouds like they could be another Bill Gates, or a feminist version of Joan of Arc. In their mind, they can be anything.
It is fine to be who ever you want. Just remember that there are trade-offs to what ever path you take. If you do not want a traditional conservative lifestyle, then you can expect a very lonely life when you get older. Men will not partner up with older single women who do not give him the respect that attractive young females do.
Good for them.
They will find out that as they march this road all alone, that it starts to get very lonely. People need each other. We form families and love-strengthened bonds.
When they hit their 40’s childless, alone, with only their pets for company, let’s see how well they fare when no one visits them in the hospital when they are diagnosed with cancer. Let’s see how joyous their holidays are. Let’s see how much appreciation their companies and employers give to them for their “sacrifice”. Let’s see.
So they can drink their expensive Starbucks coffee alone inside. They can play on their iphone. They can check out the latest on social media.
Meanwhile you and I are going to spend time with our loved ones eating delicious food, talking about the things that matter to us, and enjoying each other’s company.
Now, wouldn’t you love to drink a beer with this wonderful melted sandwich? I know I would. And that is the point of all this. Food is meant to be shared. It evokes thoughts and memories of love, care and nurturing. That is why meals with family are so very important.
In praise of the great
You know, you do not need to inject the meals with tons of sugar to make them delicious. (I once had a girlfriend that used to do this. I didn’t care too much for the sugar-laden cooking.) Personally, I prefer simple and clean ingredients with light seasoning.
Which brings me back around to the delicious lunch meal of soup and sandwich. (Yeah, you all were probably wondering when I’d get back around to it.)
Oh it sounds so easy. Just a simple sandwich with baloney, mayo on white bread and a can of soup. But it’s not. Those are only the very basics. A woman, a skilled and knowledgeable woman can transform those basic materials into something marvelous and special. In the picture above you have three kinds of cheese melted on rye toast with tomato. Wow! And take a gander at that soup eh? This is amazing.
When I was a young boy, for a while I carried a lunch box. And inside that lunch box, my mother would prepare for me a soup (inside the thermos), a delicious sandwich inside a paper bag, and a piece of fruit. This varied from a apple to a banana and everything in between. And yes, it was easy enough to get candy and soda at school, we always ate our healthy lunches during lunch break.
Of course, I am from a different generation. Baloney was a staple, as was olive loaf, Braunschweiger, and peanut butter.
Oh, the Reuben! A powerful punch of salty sourness that comes courtesy of tasty corned beef, Swiss cheese, Russian dressing and sauerkraut. With so much overpowering flavor coming from your sandwich, it’s important to make a beer selection that serves as a balancing tray for the Reuben.
A real talented woman can make the most amazing dishes. You see, a woman has the ability to put everything into anything she does. If she loves you and her family, she will give you everything. She will provide for you. She will prop you up when you collapse, and she will keep your well-fed and strong. She will make fine delicious food for you. She will never let your down.
Not, like progressive women do. Don’t believe me? Facts don’t lie.
This is a chart of the divorce rate in the United States over time. You can clearly see that the SJW feminist movement during the 1970’s played a major role in the divorce rate in America and the reduction on parental education for the children. This was coincidentally ALSO the time when the majority of American households migrated away from traditional conservative family arrangements to progressive arrangements wither there are no rule, no role, and no responsibilities. What is truly sad about this is that most Americans today, having been raised in families after 1975, have no idea how wonderful a traditional conservative family arrangement could be.
China
Of course, long time readers of this blog will know that I live in China. China is a conservative paradise. It is a place where Chinese traditions are enjoyed, appreciated, and protected from progressive liberal influences. In fact, if you even try to pull any SJW, or progressive moves, the government will come and arrest you. Next stop? Re-education center to strip-mine all that evil progressive thought out of your mind.
One of the things that I miss the most about the awesome American culture is the wonderful food. How about some awesome and genuine American food? Right? Am I right or am I right? Maybe something along the lines of this…
What is better than a delicious Ruben sandwich? I like it served with thousand island dressing, and then I love to dip it in the dressing when I eat it. You know, the secret in making a good Ruben is avoiding having the bread get soggy. You can do this by enclosing the sauerkraut with the meat, and toasting the bread properly.
Eating American food, in a solid conservative culture is glorious. Ah, you’ve got to love China.
Here is a traditional, and typical, Chinese housewife.
In traditional societies, such as China, and America 50-years ago, the household is run traditionally. The man, as the head of the household, would go work and earn money and give all the money to the wife to budget. The wife, would be in-charge of finance, budgeting, and all domestic matters including raising the children and educating them.
Vintage American advertisement depicting an American housewife cooking for her family. This is sadly no longer part of the American cultural scene. However, in nations that do not engage in non-stop wars, they still do maintain traditional roles. This means that his scene, with minor cultural differences, can be seen all over China.
This relic still exists in China, though it has been modified to some degree by the necessities of modern life. For in China, multi-generational households run traditional, and conservative is the norm.
Here we have a housewife showing show she cooks delicious and nutritious meals for her family. So that when the husband gets home from work, and the children come home from school, this is what they can look forward to eating…
Anyways, and the big point that I would like to underline is very simple. Food is the way to people’s heart. Maybe the world has treated you poorly. Maybe you have problems. Maybe you are lonely. Maybe nothing is going well…
Share a meal with a friend.
If you can make it yourself, do so. It will cost less and you will be able to enjoy it within the privacy of your own home. Oh, and don’t skimp on the beer. There is nothing worse than cheap beer. Get the good stuff and enjoy it with your friends.
Here’s a steak grilled cheese to get you inspired.
Delicious steak grilled cheese sandwich. It goes great with a nice hot creamy soup and icy frosty beer. After a hard day at work, wouldn’t you just love to come home to a loving family and this waiting for you at the table? Most men would.
Conclusion
The truth and the fact is that most men that I know would be willing to give 100% of everything that he earns, if his wife uses it to make a solid, well taken cared for, household. FACT.
It is the progressive liberal socialist reality that says otherwise. In that reality it is one where there are no roles, no rules, and no structure. People come together, or not. Build a family or not. Divorce and find others, or not. It just doesn’t matter. There is no glue, or any thing of substance to keep the family together.
I urge everyone to revisit a traditional family arrangement. It will mean less income, but a much… much higher standard of living.
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.
Posts about the Changes in America
America is going through a period of change. Change is good… that is, after it occurs. Often however, there are large periods of discomfort as the period of adjustment takes place. Here are some posts that discuss this issue.
More Posts about Life
I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.
Articles & Links
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
The Rwandan genocide was initiated, and put into motion, by the rich urban elite inside the cities. They used the Civil War as an opportunity to “cleanse” the nation of thought contrary to their ideology.
In a like manner, the political elite in the United States will use an “event” to initiate full scale genocide against others who do not share their ideology. It will be called a “Civil War” but it will be anything but civil.
When the SHTF in Rwanda, it was initiated by the urban elite and President of the country. They used organized cells, and the military to kill and destroy the minority for ideological reasons and purposes.
The Disarming
“People who own guns are essentially a sickness in our souls who must be cleansed.”
-Colorado Senator (Majority Leader) John Morse. 2013 (Cleansed? “Final Solution” anyone?)
Never allow yourself to be disarmed. The promises that a pure and safe utopia will somehow arrive are all lies.
People, armed and trained, and most importantly WILLING to use the guns are the ONLY defense against genocide by wealthy oligarchs.
The second amendment to the Constitution is useless UNLESS citizens are trained, practiced, and ready to use the firearms.
Armed militia in the Bosnian conflict. The news media want to say that the conflict was over religion. That one side was against Muslims. But that is not true at all. It was an ideological war, one that pitted the urban areas against the rural areas. A decade long period of ideological rhetoric predated the first attacks, and the mastermind of all the genocide was from an urban area.
You know all that horrible, horrible violence in Yugoslavia in the 1990’s all came to a head as soon as the population was disarmed. Yes, all those “deplorables clutching their guns” are correct.
Arms, ammunition, candles, lighters, antibiotics, gasoline, batteries and food. We fought for these things like animals. In these situations, it all changes. Men become monsters. It was disgusting. Strength was in numbers. A man living alone getting killed and robbed would be just a matter of time, even if he was armed.
-Commonsense Show
As soon as the people were stripped of their weapons, the “dogs of war” were unleashed. They didn’t even wait a full year. They banned guns, collected them, and then took a short breather.
A month, four tops.
Then they came after everyone who was disarmed. They used lists. They came after them and they killed them if they could not find any of the guns.
Bosnian dead 1993. Know your history.
Scapegoating an unpopular group is standard operating procedure for budding socialist dictators wrecking once-free economies. For the Soviets, it was the Kulaks; for the Chinese it was the so-called “landlords.” I could list more recent cases to include Cambodia, Uganda, Guatemala, Rwanda and others. Once disarmed and helpless to resist, the hated national scapegoats are slaughtered by the millions.
Probably few Turks, Germans or Russians gave a thought to the ultimate aim of their new gun registration laws, passed quite plausibly in the name of public safety. But national gun registration is a slow-acting poison, sweet and easy to swallow, but potentially becoming deadly only years later, when a tyrant takes the reins of power and inevitably sends for the list. He begins with his most dangerous enemies and works his way through the list, marching the helpless scapegoats into deserts or gas chambers or gulags after disarming them.
In America today, we are seeing the beginning of an insidious scapegoating process, with older conservative white Christian males designated as the national Lucifer du jour, fair game for any vicious attack. Famous black movie stars joke about murdering white folks and white liberal media stars laugh along with them, conveying elite acceptance of the prevailing “evil whitey” meme.
Filled from birth on a steady diet of the pervasiveness of white racism in America, rage-filled urban youths across the nation play “the knockout game” with often fatal results for their randomly selected white or Asian victims. Meanwhile, the elite liberal media fail to notice the national scope of the almost weekly occurrences. Google “the knockout game” and start reading the dozens of local stories that the media refuse to connect or identify as part of a dangerous national trend.
And it doesn’t stop with knocking out random passers-by with sucker punches and then kicking them in head until they are dead, disfigured for life, or in comas. Have you ever heard of “The Knoxville Horror”? How about “The Wichita Horror”? Google them, read the local news articles about them, and ask yourself how much national media attention those cases and others like them would garner had the races been reversed.
-Bracken
Marxist child-soldier with his prisoner. Once the Marxists feel ready to strike they will use easily manipulated soldiers and let them loose on an unsuspecting population. They will be children, and young, but they will be able to kill you without a moment’s thought.
First, the people have to be disarmed “for their safety”…
They came after everyone and they used lists.
“The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life,” Representative Maxine Waters told Roland Martin on Monday.
“That’s going to be very, very powerful,” Waters said. “That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it’s never been done before and whoever runs for President on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that.
They’re going to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can’t get around it. And he’s [President Obama] been very smart. It’s very powerful what he’s leaving in place.”
-The Gateway Pundit
They hunted them down, following the lists, and then killed them.
Know your history. Genocide is never pretty. The progressive liberals will of course try to distract and confuse. They will make up all kinds of excuses for their evil. But, make no mistake, these socialists are evil.
First of all I would like to remind you of the political situation before the war. The disintegration of Yugoslavia could not be stopped after Tito died in 1980. From 1981 the Serbian regime in Belgrade started to act in an even more nationalistic and chauvinist way than before.
During that time, for example, the Serbian military police killed several unarmed students by running them over with tanks at demonstrations in the mostly Albanian populated Kosovo.
In 1988 the Serbian regime took away the autonomous status of the provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina. In this way the Serbian regime violated the constitution of Yugoslavia.
During that time the Belgrade regime started to take control of weapons from all parts of the country.
-biserinternBtional
People needed to be disarmed before they were collected. The pretty ones, or even not pretty, but young, were repeatedly raped. Then everyone sooner or later were killed. Know your history. Do not allow yourself to be disarmed. Never allow yourself to be disarmed. That is the worst thing that you can do. Do not be a fool. Disarmed people obey the government when they are herded into the cattle cars.
There are those who believe that it will not happen.
But I will tell you that it is only a matter of time. It WILL happen, and the progressive liberals are chomping at the bit just waiting for the day to disarm their enemies…YOU.
When people are disarmed, the police and the militarized liberal ideologist can pretty much do anything they want with you. They will use you for what ever reason they want, and then discard you when finished. Read your history, folks.
Who can forget the iconic scene in the movie “Red Dawn”, where the progressive soviet communists invade Colorado and use the gun registration records to hut down and target opposition locally. What? You think that that would never happen here. Wrong! It’s already happening. Read the links above.
Right now there are some news articles about the police refusing to enforce gun laws, and other such things… like yet another total gun ban, and a news media going full-on with reporting of gun violence.
This kind of scene will be repeated all over the United States. Mall parking lots, of the parking lots in front of Walmart will be the scene where people (on lists) will be brought to, and then interrogated and then killed. It will happen. This could be in your town. Think, where these people could be easily rounded up and then killed.
These stockpiles are already in various locations. The police are finding them all over the “blue color” liberal areas.
Hidden stockpiles of weapons lie hidden in progressive liberal strongholds. Their intended use is for armed insurrection in favor of a progressive Marxist ideology .
Make no mistake. They have been groomed to hate you with a bitterness that is palpable. There are caches of arms that are located in all of the major urban areas, and their objective is to go forth and collect you and your family, and exterminate you.
Social Justice Warriors, who are actually progressive liberal democrats by name, but active Marxists by function. These people look like nothing special, but they are extremely dangerous. As they want to kill you.
They have more false flags planned, and have tiger teams of activists waiting for “go aheads” once they believe that they have complete control of the DHS and military (as what was supposed to happen with Hillary Clinton as president).
The 2017 Las Vegas shooting was a pre-planned event. It was especially designed for a Hillary Clinton Presidency. Then, once in power, the formula of constant media barrage of anti-gun propaganda, the loss of many country and western fans, and an in-place “deep state” pretty much guaranteed banning of guns in the United States. Only one thing… Donald Trump was President. Not Hillary Clinton.
Scene from Libya. Don’t ever be under the impression that random people run around shooting and killing people. Rather it is organized groups of thugs that work for wealthy benefactors that organize all the killings.
You know the reason, to use once they regain the levers of power in the United States. You don’t think that that Antifa that pose for public photos are representative of the real dangers that lie ahead. They are not.
The real danger still lies hidden, and they will go after you.
The progressive liberal democrats have been stock piling weapons and caches of ammo. They have trained and unified forces that have stayed and remain hidden from the news media. These forces will align with other public forces once they regain the total and complete levers of power in the government. Then the real shooting will begin.
The progressive socialist Marxists, by what ever they want to call themselves these days, have been armed and groomed for genocide. make no mistake about that. They are going to come after YOU.
They are going to disarm YOU.
Then there will be a small breather…
Then they will round you and your family into “safe areas”, which are actually areas that THEY control.
There, you will be harmed, in the most horrible ways possible and then killed.
Know your history. Do not allow yourself to be disarmed. Never allow yourself to be disarmed. That is the worst thing that you can do. Do not be a fool. Disarmed people obey the government when they are herded into the cattle cars.
Planned Attacks
Not all actions by the oligarchy are successful. The coup that tried to take over the Former Soviet Union resulted in failure. Here is a picture of all the oligarchs that tried to initiate Civil War in the Soviet Union. Too bad, for them, that the people and the military were not on “their side”.
Once a “kick off” event is set in motion (what ever it is), history has shown that the instigating forces will have the following characteristics;
It will be planned, and designed to appear “organic” or spontaneous.
The instigators will be the wealthy elite of the United States.
They will have control of most of the organs of power in government.
They will have control or full backing of the media.
They will have control of the military, the police, and the air.
When the “event” unfolds, it will appear to be confused and chaotic. But that is just an illusion. In truth, historically there are numerous armed forces working together in unison. These forces are…
[1]Roving Bands of ideological youth
These are historically, poor urban males. They have been pre-fed a steady diet of hate towards a set group of people. They are worked into a frenzy through propaganda and drugs. They will be issued and equipped with weapons, including full automatic machine guns and grenade launchers. They will also be provided with trucks or four-wheel drive cars. They will be given lists of people to attack, and target cities or areas.
Young boys, children soldiers sit on February 10, 2015 with their rifles on board a jeep or truck. These roving bands of youth were used to inflict terror all across the nation. .
Taking those lists they will attack, seemingly randomly, like some kind of “wack a mole”.
.They will follow the targeting lists provided by the various instigators of the event.
.
These lists will consist of lightly defended areas, farms, small towns and communities. They will start at those nearest urban areas and fan outward from there.
.
Lists.
.
They will have lists.
Lists.
They will have lists.
Then they will search out anyone on those lists.
Roving bands of ideological youth during the second Congo civil war. Here they are better armed, and had some training compared to the Sudanese or those from Sierra Leone. Never the less they are always to be considered very dangerous.
They may or may not be dressed in military clothing. However, they will have some kind of identification on them. This might be a scarf, a hat, or a string of beads.
In the movie “No Escape”, the radicalized youth are shown depicted by wearing a kind of red scarf. This is also a common enough identifier. When the cities are ruled by mobs set up in a frenzy, and all you have is yourself, it is best to be armed, and secure. You need to be aware that everything… no matter how apparently organic… is all preplanned. You and your family is on a check list, and you need to ride out the events with strength, courage and conviction. This is not a television show or Hollywood movie. There will not be a second chance. It will be make a decision and follow through. Or die.Monrovia in August 1990. Groups of armed thugs from the poorer sections of the nation were provided with drugs and fully automatic weapons, and vehicular transport and told to “go after” the people that the oligarchy spent decades vilifying. This scene will be duplicated by a thousand in America.
After the war, we had guns in every house. The police confiscated lots of guns at the beginning of the war. But most of them we hid. Now I have one legal gun that I have a license for. Under the law, that’s called a temporary collection. If there is unrest, the government will seize all the registered guns. Never forget that.You know, there are many people who have one legal gun, but also illegal guns if that one gets seized. If you have good trade goods, you might be able to get a gun in a tough situation. But remember, the most difficult time is the first days, and perhaps you won’t have enough time to find a weapon to protect your family. To be disarmed in a time of chaos and panic is a bad idea.
- Commonsense Show
[2]The Military
In most cases, the military is never trusted fully. While often those in power and who instigated the attacks have the backing of the military, it is never 100% guaranteed.
Thus, the military will be used to secure the urban centers, key buildings, structures and roads. Those who are in control will use the military to defend their strong points and only use them for special events when the need is required.
During oligarchy sponsored civil war, the military is kept under control through control of the top leadership. They in turn keep the troops ignorant of events, and keep them close by and they are told to “stand down”.
Often the military is told to “stand down”, and they will not know the full extent of what is going on. Often loyalists to the Constitution will have been purged from positions of control early on. Leaving the upper tiers of the military with ideological pawns for use by the oligarchy.
Zentralbild. II.Weltkrieg 1939-1945. In Germany, Hitler emptied the prisons of the most despicable evil murderers, rapists and sadistic torturers, and gave them uniforms, a military unit to be a part of, and assigned them to conduct terror operations against selected groups of civilians.
This almost always works. However, this was stopped when the troops are aware of news outside of the military channels. Such as in the Soviet Union.
The 1991 Soviet coup d’état attempt, also known as the August Coup (Russian: августовский путч, tr. Avgustovskiy Putch “August Putsch”), was an attempt by members of the government of the USSR to take control of the country from Soviet President and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. It was unsuccessful, and the troops ended up turning the tables on the oligarchy and conspirators.
Hard-line elements of the Soviet government and military begin a coup attempt against President Mikhail Gorbachev. The coup attempt signified a decline in Gorbachev’s power and influence, while one of his most ardent opponents, Boris Yeltsin, came out of the event with more power than ever. By August 1991, hard-line elements of the Soviet government and military decided to act and staged a coup against Gorbachev. Gorbachev was put under house arrest, and his enemies demanded that he resign as leader of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev refused, but many outside of Russia began to feel that his government could not survive. Yeltsin and many of his supporters, who had taken refuge in the Russian Parliament, then stepped in. Yeltsin correctly perceived that if the coup were successful, even the limited reforms begun by Gorbachev would be destroyed. He called on the Russian people to strike and take to the streets to oppose the coup. The people responded by the thousands, and the poorly organized coup collapsed only a few days later.
Embedded Agents
Embedded confederates in key companies, offices, government and communities will feed back information on the success or failure of the effort. This will include the “diversity officers” at companies, as well as activists on university campuses, and local progressives in the communities all over the country.
"In controversial “implicit bias” training, New York City’s public-school educators have been told to focus on black children over white ones — and one Jewish superintendent who described her family’s Holocaust tragedies was scolded and humiliated, according to firsthand accounts. A consultant hired by the city Department of Education told administrators at a workshop that “racial equity” means favoring black children regardless of their socio-economic status, sources said."
- Teachers allegedly told to favor black students in ‘racial equity’ training
When given the opportunity, ideological Germans turning in their friends, sister’s boyfriends, uncles, and neighbors to be tortured and killed by the dreaded Nazi Gestapo. This is a fact of life when dealing with people who place ideological beliefs over everything else. Know your history. Do not allow yourself to be disarmed. Never allow yourself to be disarmed. That is the worst thing that you can do. Do not be a fool. Disarmed people obey the government when they are herded into the cattle cars.
The Final Step
Of course, here is the real ugly part. It’s the last and final step. For the most part, it hasn’t happened yet. However, once there is a Progressive majority in the Congress, the Executive and the Judicial branches of government it WILL OCCUR.
It was only a “miracle” that the event was postponed by the election of Donald Trump. Everything is still in place. They are just biding their time until they can initiate the planned genocide.
Once the progressives decide to make their move, and they are 85% in control of the United States, as it is, the end result will not be pretty. History is replete on what happens when ideological socialists come to power and exert their influence. Know your history. Prepare for the inevitable.
I will say it plainly and boldly. Know your history. It is a roadmap of what to expect.
Graphic photograph of a capture and subsequent rape of a young girl by German soldiers. Know your history. This will be common. Know your history. Do not allow yourself to be disarmed. Never allow yourself to be disarmed. That is the worst thing that you can do. Do not be a fool. Disarmed people obey the government when they are herded into the cattle cars.
Read. Remember.
Sarajevo was an Olympic city back when Ronald Reagan was President. Under Bill Clinton, it was under siege. It was shelled by tanks, artillery, aircraft, attacked by snipers and machine guns, and the residents either starved or died of horrific wounds.
During the Bosnian civil war, the “wrong” kinds of people where holed up in Sarajevo. The troops surrounded it and laid siege. For four long years they killed everything that moved there. 11,000 people died there.
Do not be under the impression that Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Charlotte, Denver, Hattiesburgh, or Dallas / Fort Worth couldn’t be another Sarajevo. They could easily be.
When the citizenry are disarmed, they tend to be easily corralled. If you convince them that they will be safe (a lie of course), you can convince them to strip naked. And then you can lead them down into ditches to be slaughtered easily. The key is to constantly lie and reassure them that you are helping them.
About the photo above;
Liepaja Massacres: Shocking Photos Taken by Nazi Perpetrators of Jewish Women Moments Before Their Execution in Skede, Latvia on December 15-17, 1941
The murders in the dunes at Skede on the Baltic shore, some fifteen kilometers north of the city and about a kilometer from the road towards the sea, began as early as July 1941. Some 200 Jews were murdered there.
During a three-day massacre on December 15-17, 1941, German and Latvian units killed 2,749 Jews, more than half of Liepaja’s Jewish population. Preparations for the operation began some days before. On December 13, 1941, Liepaja Police Chief Obersturmbannfuehrer Fritz Diedrich placed an announcement in the Latvian newspaper Kurzemes Vards stating that Jews were forbidden to leave their living quarters on Monday, December 15, and Tuesday, December 16.
On the night of December 13, Latvian police forces began to arrest Liepaja’s Jews not yet concentrated in the ghetto. The victims were brought to the Women’s Prison, where Jews of all ages were crammed into the courtyard. The Jews were ordered to stand with their faces towards the wall, and warned not to move or look around for relatives or at the watchmen. Some were transported to Skede on the evening of the following day and crowded into a barn (a wooden structure, described also as a garage).
In the early morning of December 15, a column of victims was driven from Liepaja by Latvian policemen, under the supervision of the German SD, to the same barn in Skede where Jews from the prison had been taken. They were taken in groups of twenty to a site forty to fifty meters from a deep ditch dug in the dunes nearby, parallel to the shore. The ditch was about three meters wide and 100 meters long. There they were forced to lie face down on the ground. Groups of ten were then ordered to stand up and, apart from the children, to undress, at first to their underwear and then, when taken near the ditch, completely. They were shot by a German unit, the Latvian SD Platoon headed by Lt. Peteris Galins, and a Latvian Schutzmannschaften team.
During the murder operation, the Jews were placed along the side of the ditch nearest the sea, facing the water. The killing squad was positioned across the ditch, with two marksmen shooting at the same victim. Children who could walk were treated as adults, but babies were held by their mothers and killed with them. A “kicker” rolled in those corpses that did not fall directly into the ditch. After each volley, a German SD man stepped into the ditch to inspect the bodies and finish off anyone who showed signs of life.
The clothes were piled up in heaps and taken away by German military trucks. During the murder operation, Carl Strott and another officer, Erich Handke, took pictures with a Minox, and senior Wehrmacht and navy officers visited the site.
These photos were found by a Jewish man named David Zivcon, who worked as an electrician at the SD headquarters in Liepaja. A few weeks or months after the execution, he was sent to fix something at Strott’s residence, and notices four negative reels in a partially open drawer. He took them, made copies with the help of a friend, and smuggled them back to the apartment after making up an electricity problem. He put the copies in a box and buried them in a stable. After liberation, he took the photos and handed them to Soviet Intelligence officers. The photos were eventually presented as evidences at the Nuremberg trials. It's all on historical record.
Today, a Google image-reverse image search comes up with "hits" saying that this image and others are fake. Nonsense. Why are the progressive democrat Marxists so Hell-bent on erasing this particular part of history from the record...
Over one thousand Jews from the Ukrainian town of Lubny, ordered to assemble for resettlement, in an open field before they were massacred by Einsatzgruppen. Lubny, Soviet Union, October 16, 1941. Know your history. Do not allow yourself to be disarmed. Never allow yourself to be disarmed. That is the worst thing that you can do. Do not be a fool. Disarmed people obey the government when they are herded into the cattle cars.This is what the roads will look like once the Marxists take control. No one will be spared. They will kill and kill indiscriminately. They will kill you, your family and everything that even looks like you. Corpses will be commonplace. How do we know? Because the Marxists have made their mark in history, and no… NO! This time will not be different.
The “end game” for the progressive liberals.
Historically, the final step is NEVER pretty. Historically, those who are isolated are rounded up and eliminated from public discourse by a combination of methods with isolation, imprisonment, and death being but a small part of it.
Once the civilians were led into the already dug ditches, the soldiers stood on the sides and shot at them. Anyone who moved, any thing that twitched was shot by 8mm or 7mm caliber bullets. . Know your history. Do not allow yourself to be disarmed. Never allow yourself to be disarmed. That is the worst thing that you can do. Do not be a fool. Disarmed people obey the government when they are herded into the cattle cars. .
It doesn’t matter if the progressive takeover took place last year, twenty years ago, fifty years ago, one hundred years ago of 5000 years ago. It is always the same.
It is always the same.
The picture is blurry. It is black and white. It is thus hard for us to relate to. But, look at the content shown. Here we have whole scale mass hangings of civilians. .
All because of politics and ideology. It is coming to America and you are in the cross-hairs. Know your history. . Do not allow yourself to be disarmed. Never allow yourself to be disarmed. . That is the worst thing that you can do. Do not be a fool. Disarmed people obey the government when they are herded into the cattle cars.
It's an age often described as one of social unrest, leading to an "apocalyptic nightmare of violence, warfare, and cannibalism." A Neolithic mass grave in Germany shows the idea may not be far wrong… Christian Meyer and his fellow researchers now believe they have enough evidence to explain "conclusively" what happened at the site of a mass grave in Schöneck-Kilianstädten, near Frankfurt, around 5207-4849 BC.
If they are right, their findings may help our understanding of early social unrest among the first Central European farmers of the Neolithic era…
The site at Schöneck-Kilianstädten reveals a "new violence-related pattern: the intentional and systematic breaking of lower limbs." At least 26 people at the site were tortured and systematically beaten before being thrown into a pit.
Most of the victims were men and children aged between 12 and 13 years. The researchers found evidence of only two women, estimated to have been older than 40.
It suggests any younger women -- for example, mothers of the children -- were abducted… Their theory chimes with evidence found at two other Neolithic massacre sites: one at Talheim, Germany and the other at Asparn/Schletz, Austria… Among the men and children in the mass grave, Meyer and the team found many damaged skulls, fractured calves and shins… Meyer says the three sites together prove that as early as 7000 years ago, acts of "collective violence" were common.
The transformation will be absolutely complete when they take away guns. Then, only the rulers will have weapons. Oh, what a dangerous time that will be. (Have you ever wondered why people in the Democrat party are so absolutely focused in disarming the population? Well you should.)
Then, once the people are disarmed, then the “real” changes can take place.
Know your history. . This is what really happens when a particular group comes to power and their enemies are disarmed. It is never pretty. . Know your history. Do not allow yourself to be disarmed. Never allow yourself to be disarmed. . That is the worst thing that you can do. Do not be a fool. Disarmed people obey the government when they are herded into the cattle cars.
BENTOL, LIBERIA: A rebel of Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) fire 03 August 1990 in Bentol on student William Weah (C), executing his after roadside interrogation fifty kilometers east of Monrovia. NPFL rebels suspected Weah to be a member of the Krahn ethnic group, the tribe supplying fighters to army of President Samuel Doe. Following the outbreak of civil war, President Doe was captured and killed in Monrovia 09 September 1990. (Photo credit should read JOEL ROBINE/AFP/Getty Images) .
Oh, this will be a dangerous time to be an American, I’ll tell you what. I shouldn’t need to tell you what will happen then. It will just be a repeat of what has always happened once people are disarmed in a nation that is an oligarchy.
When you cannot fight back, they can do what ever they want with you.
This is what happens to people who do not “go along” with the “new” way of doing things. It is never pretty. You are rounded up. You are handcuffed, and you are killed. That is the way it has been for thousands of years. It never stopped. It will continue.
But we have the “Bill of Rights”…
The Germans also had their own version of the “Bill of Rights”. . It really didn’t help them that much, did it? . Just like the American Bill of Rights is not enforced today. . What? You think that the Utah data Collection Center obeys the fourth amendment? What? People, the entire purpose of the regulatory agency the ATF is to infringe on the second amendment. Know your history. Do not allow yourself to be disarmed. Never allow yourself to be disarmed. That is the worst thing that you can do. Do not be a fool. Disarmed people obey the government when they are herded into the cattle cars. .
The “Bill of Rights” is only as good as their enforcement. How can there be a fourth amendment (to the bill of Rights) AND a Utah Data Collection Center? You know, a center that collects your private “papers and data” for government inspection and use.
How can there be 5000 anti-gun laws on the books nationwide when the 2nd Amendment to the Bill of Rights still exists? It does say “shall NOT be infringed”.
If you have been paying attention, you the reader, should know all the progressive arguments. “(That) one’s individual freedom is not nearly as important as the needs of the defenseless children.”
Pretty fucked up, as you should realize that once the rights of the majority are more important than individual rights… there are no individual rights. Duh!
Armed ideological youth used during the South Sudan war. These youth were given drugs and fed a daily dose of propaganda so that they could move forth and terrorize the rural areas surrounding the cities. .
Anyways, the point is that the United States government is dismantling our rights one by one and offering nothing in return except empty promises.
American RIGHTS are being dismantled one by one, and NOT ONE PERSON is defending them.
There can only be one singular result to this. Make no mistake about it. Once the Rights no longer exist, and their preservation is not enforced, then there are no Rights. As such, the government can do what ever it wants with you.
Urban youth a fed a diet of hate and anger, and permitted to let it unleash under the effects of drugs when the proper time comes. They will not have mercy. They will consider everyone an enemy because of their “privaledge”. .
How can you have rights when you are banned from having a bank account?
The left is boxing the right in. Little by little, our allowed speech on the big tech platforms is shrinking. But too many conservatives aren’t sounding the warning bells. They think it won’t happen to them. However, we’re no longer talking about those on the fringe like Alex Jones of Infowars, Milo Yiannopoulos and Tommy Robinson. The censorship is happening to regular conservatives. It’s here, and shows no sign of letting up.
-The Left has u walking on eggshells
How can you have rights, if you are not permitted to defend them?
The logic is clear. The reasoning is simple, and the result is stark.
Shot by retreating communists once there was no longer a reason for allowing them to live. This is the face of what will happen. Know your history. Apply the lessons to contemporaneous events. The conclusion is inescapable.
Get Ready for the “SHTF Event”.
It will happen.
It’s only a matter of time. The only question is to what extent it will occur, and whether or not you and your family will be in the line of fire.
It seems so funny, yet this comic meme is 100% accurate and a large percentage of Americans feel this way. . Don’t believe the media narrative. Look at Gun sales int he United States, and notice and pay particular attention to the relationship between Democrat proclamations, sponsored laws, and citizen procurement of weapons. . No, people are NOT buying these weapons to hunt deer.
Keep this in mind…
Big changes always need a catalyst or major event to “kick off” a domino effect. This is very important to realize. All one needs to do is to look at historical examples. Then look at what is going on in the United States today.
“People who own guns are essentially a sickness in our souls who must be cleansed.”
-Colorado Senator (Majority Leader) John Morse. 2013 (Cleansed? “Final Solution” anyone?)
Once the one political party gained control of the government, they initiated full-scale genocide on the people that they had spent over a decade demonizing through the mainstream media. This entire event was initiated when the plane carrying the president of Rwanda was shot down. .
They WILL disarm you.
They will continue to demonize you and you will NOT fight back.
No one ever wins a defensive war. You need to strike at the leadership’ their enclaves, their minions and their families. Do not fight a defensive war.
If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.
More Posts about Life
I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.
Articles & Links
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Everything is currently in place for a full-scale genocide against “the privileged white”, the “rural deporables”, and the “crackers who are racist and love slavery”. You know who they are targeting. Yet, somehow everything thinks that all this narrative is organic. That it grew into being on it’s own. Wrong. It is cultivated, and intentional to drum up hatred and zeal to “transform America”.
“The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life,” Representative Maxine Waters told Roland Martin on Monday.
“That’s going to be very, very powerful,” Waters said. “That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it’s never been done before and whoever runs for President on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that. They’re going to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can’t get around it. And he’s [President Obama] been very smart. It’s very powerful what he’s leaving in place.”
-The Gateway Pundit
Political Commissars
One of the things that occurred during the Obama Administration was
the creation of “Diversity Officers”. The administration was very active
in this regard and today you will find them in every single Fortune 500
Company in the United States.
A “Diversity Officer” is a “Political Commissar”.
America
has political commissars strategically placed within all of the
main-stream media corporations and all of the Fortune 500 companies in
the United States. While they do not wear any military uniform, they do
have an identical appearance. Which you can easily see by looking up the
term “Diversity Officer” on LinkedIN. They are SJW Feminist
professionals. They are tasked with the exact same roles that political
commissars had in Russia, China, Cambodia, and North Korea have. They
terminology has changed but the ideology has not.
Their sole purpose of existence is to promote and force-feed a
progressive liberal socialist agenda in the majority of workplaces in
the nation.
The University of California at San Diego, for example, is creating a new full-time “vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.”
This position would augment UC San Diego’s already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.
-Minding the Campus
When you see that saying “Merry Christmas” is banned, you can thank a
“diversity officer”. When you see a company spending millions of
dollars on an advertisement talking about “toxic masculinity”, you can
thank a “diversity officer”. When you see “whites not permitted”
meetings, or hours, you can thank a “diversity officer”. When you see
advertisements excluding white males… you can count on it be initiated
by a political commissar.
This
is open racism. Imagine if there was a sign in front of KFC saying
“sorry we are closed to educate black people about their racism”. But it
is ok in a progressive liberal society. It is a society where some
people are more “equal” than others.
As long as these people exist in the United States, the nation will transform and stay progressive.
These political commissars are particularly dangerous when SHTF. This is because…
They make lists of potential dissidents and non-conformists.
They are ideological, and make decisions on emotion.
They are in strong positions of power.
They push a progressive liberal agenda in EVERY regard.
They will prosecute against anyone based on ideology.
These lists are dangerous, as they WILL be used against you. The history books are full of such examples.
E.
Nathan Thomas III, Kansas University Vice Provost for Diversity and
Equity, right, speaks to a group of student protesters gathered inside
the administration offices at Strong Hall, Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2015.
These political commissars play an important role in shaping how society evolves, and aids in singling out obstacles to the Marxist ideology. Not only that, but tons of money are pouring towards their employment and progressive liberal activities.
During the September campaign, Soviet NKVD and Red Army troops shot numerous Polish prisoners when they surrendered, especially officers. Members of ethnic minorities—Ukrainians, Belarussians, Jews, and Lithuanians were encouraged to settle scores with local Poles for any real or imagined mistreatment.
The civilian population suffered extreme repression. Approximately 1.5 million civilians were deported to the gulags.
-Learning History
Do not be under the impression that there are only a mere handful of
political commissars in the United States. That is an illusion founded
on ignorance. Check out this screen shot of a search for “Diversity
Officers” in the United States on LinkedIN.
Here
is a search that I conducted in LinkedIN for “Diversity Officers” in
the United States. You will notice that there is an enormous number of
them and they occupy major roles in all of the Fortune 500 companies and
many lesser positions as well.
Far from enjoying supremacy, white males are denied equality. They are discriminated against in university admissions and employment. Free speech is denied to them. According to military wives, white males are being denied promotions while the military achieves diversity balancing. Google fires white males for stating basic facts. White school boys are being browbeat and feminized. The charge of white supremacy is being used to herd white people to the back of the bus. While they sit there and suck their thumbs, white people are being propagandized out of existence.
-Paul Craig Roberts
Providing Domestic Police with Expanded Powers
Up until 9-11, there was no such thing as a “Federal Police”, the DHS or Department of Homeland Security. It did not exist. That is simply because the Constitution forbade the use of soldiers on American soil. What the Constitution says is only as good as the leadership in obeying and following it.
America is what it is today because no one is following the Constitution.
In fact, the conservatives are "hands tied" trying to implement change and correct things by trying to obey the Constitution. Meanwhile, the socialists break laws and rules left and right, with no self-restraint.
Stalin does not play around. Many Socialist Progressive Liberals follow the Stalinist model in their pursuit of a world utopia.
Well, of course, just because the Constitution says it can’t happen doesn’t mean that it won’t. You just give it a new name.
And the mass murder of the Soviets and Nazis is simply no longer needed in today’s world for them to secure mass compliance.
Today, they have refined the game. You can lose your job, your healthcare, you can be legally harassed civilly and criminally until bankruptcy.
They can destroy your reputation because they have access to every single data point in your life back to high school and earlier.
They can “find” child porn in your computer or “find” cocaine in your car, or a Blasey-Ford to say you raped her sometime between 80 and 85.
You are almost certain to have violated one of the hundreds of thousands of Byzantine laws in the Federal code. They can ban your social media communications and websites.
In short, the communists and fascists of today have very little need to put a bullet in your head anymore. In the 1930s and 40s, that was the only way they had to shut you up. That was the model-T world, today they are in a Tesla world.
I think they enjoy the new techniques even better.
Instead of calling it a military force you call it a police force.
And, now we know what that friendly “police force” is up to, don’t we?
Today we have numerous domestic military forces. Not just the DHS, but
the FBI, the NSA and of course the dreaded “goose-stepping” IRS.
Today, if you do not have mandatory medical insurance you must pay the fine and it is enforced by the most feared federal agency in the United States; the dreaded IRS.
The
IRS is used to police Americans. While the US Constitution FORBIDS use
of the military on American soil, President Obama equipped them with
state of the art military grade weapons and authorized their use against
Americans without trial or Habeas Corpus.
Not only that, but President Obama gave the IRS military weapons, tanks, and a complete SWAT team. All to be used against tax evasion. But, only American citizens pay taxes, so that means that all these military weapons are being used domestically against Americans.
Why against Americans? I thought that the United States Constitution was very clear that NO MILITARY of any type shall be used by the government against Americans. Maybe they have other plans…
German citizens being corralled by German police into railroad cars “for their protection”. Of course, we all know where these trains went, and we all know what happened to the people who went into these cars. They friggin’ died.
Incidents of Conflict with supporting Media coverage demanding “action”
Once it is clear who the enemies are, the progressive socialist machine will ramp up attacks. This will be in the form of random groups of individuals who will be permitted to conduct violence without consequence, and coordinated attacks.
This may take the form of a “major event”. Like a plane crash killing the President or some senior level officials. It might be initiated by a mass murder using a selection of firearms which pretty much resulted in the disarming of the UK, Australia and New Zealand.
Works like a charm – every time.
There will be periodic acts of violence, but the major full-scale actions and activities will need to be instigated. This is often in the form of a MAJOR event like a mass-shooting, or plane crash. Of course, the plane crash was not the cause of the genocide. It was just the excuse.
It might vary from a mob chasing a boy wearing a MAGA hat, and
beating him senseless, to individuals taking a weapon and shooting up a
Country and Western Concert, or even attacking Conservatives at a
baseball game.
The media would then start to drum up a constant war beat…
Collect and ban all guns.
Arrest and go “nuclear” on gun owners.
Disarm all “identified enemies of progressive thought”
Censor their Social Media.
Censor their major media outlet and famous personalities.
Attack how they speak at work and at school.
Place limits on tradition and holidays.
You need to be reminded what lies in store for you once you are disarmed. Never forget that once the Polish Jews were disarmed, they were sent to a “safe place”. This became known as the Warsaw Ghetto and thousands died there.
WARSAW – 1943: A Jew is stopped in April 1943 by German soldiers after the rising of the ghetto of Warsaw during the second world war. On more than 300.000 Jews which the ghetto counted, the majority died of hunger, disease or were off-set in concentration camp. In Jew is arrested by German soldiers in April 1943 after the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto during WW2. When the Nazis set up the ghetto in 1940, it held more than 300.000 Jews. Two years later most of them has either died from starvation or disease. The survivors were then carted off to a nearby extermination camp. (Photo by AFP/Getty Images)
...how about a paper in an approved and sanctioned semi-official U.S. military publication, written by a War College professor in good standing. Serious enough for you? Google the “Small Wars Journal” piece entitled “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A Vision of the Future,” by Colonel Kevin Benson, USA (ret), 2012.
The “full spectrum operations” envisaged for the Army in the homeland are not made against hypothetical hostile drug cartels in the Southwest, or urban gangs, or the traditionally ambiguous and vague “Pineland Liberation Group,” or “Orangeland People’s Front,” hypothetical stand-ins named to offend no one, not even by accident.
This long-standing neutral naming protocol is tossed aside in “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland,” where the new domestic enemy that the U.S. Army must crush is a neo-KKK, a white racist “Tea Party terrorist” organization, headquartered in, of all places, Darlington, South Carolina. Yes, the NASCAR Darlington.
Anybody who has been in or near an actual Tea Party event or rally knows the crowd is made up mainly of an older white population, a quiet group that leaves no mess behind, not even a stray poster, and causes no fuss.
Yet “Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland” postulates that these white grandpas and grannies will be the very group that the U.S. Army will be called upon to crush in its first major battles on American soil since 1865. The message this paper sends throughout the upper ranks of the War-College-trained military, actually naming an ethnic group—Southern whites—as the national enemy to “hypothetically” be crushed by the Army in the year 2016, is simply mind-boggling.
The path forward that is indicated by the media’s growing acceptance of these vile and outrageous anti-white celebrity rants, cartoons, and articles is the same path that in previous eras led to the guillotine, the gulag, and the gas chamber for the scapegoated populations. But the final solution—genocide of the scapegoats—is only possible after the mob is sufficiently inflamed with hatred toward them by the mass media, in collaboration with an evil government. And time after time, it works.
We are seeing the opening stages of the scapegoating of white conservatives today, as the last election seems to demonstrate to the left’s satisfaction that a crucial political and demographic tipping point has been passed, and the ultimate power equations of raw tribal loyalty have changed in a fundamental way—and now it’s payback time.
We have seen this play out before in other countries and times, and it is deadly serious. Once the scapegoating gets far enough under way, it can pick up a life and a momentum of its own. For example, if the economy ever truly crashes, and the EBT system that feeds fifty million Americans goes down hard, leading to hunger, looting, and riots, (or we suffer other unforeseen problems of similar crisis proportions), the scapegoats will always be dragged to the forefront as the pre-designated patsy, to deflect blame from the government.
-Bracken
Never Forget
I banned guns and then killed everyone.
Isolation and “ProtectionsNever Forget
Remember Animal Farm from back when you were in school and they taught it as a chilling warning about socialism instead of as a how-to manual? Remember the horse who got worked nearly to death then got sent to the glue farm?
Guess what? You’re the horse.
Your job is to work to generate taxes and feed the cities and defend the country while your betters clink Chardonnay glasses between bouts of redistributing the fruits of your labor to buy the votes of their slack Democrat political constituencies.
And besides being the engine that powers the establishment, you also fulfill another important function. You’re the liberal elite’s punching bag, the scapegoat, the convenient excuse for every flaw, failing and foul-up in the society that very same elite runs.
You don’t get the credit you’re due; instead you get scorn, because that scorn both gins up the elite’s dopey allies and acts to keep you in line. It’s a stick to beat you and a chain to bind you.
-Townhall
Once the enemies of the “New Progressive Order” are identified, and they are sufficiently isolated into small groups or easily identified, the next step is to have the government come in and offer “protections” for them.
Of course, these protections are anything but protections. They are just a means of rounding up and collecting dissenters.
Young thugs armed with weapons during the Liberian civil war. They terrorized everyone that they could. The people ran from them into “protective” enclaves. There, they were pawns to be used by the oligarchy for what ever purposes they wanted.
“Protections” will be necessary, you see to keep people safe from the roving bands of ideological youth. Of whom, I must remind the reader, has that exact purpose. They are the terror sheep dogs that help corral the sheep to be fleeces.
Remember when the socialists say “to protect” they mean “to control”.
Children
rounded up in Syria by the occupation forces. The parents gave them up
because the new government promised to protect them and keep them out of
harm’s way while the war raged. As a result they were sold and abused.
many died.
We cannot forget how all the Jews in Germany were rounded up. They were told that they were going to protective enclaves so that no one would harm them. So people packed their luggage and boarded the trains. Let’s not forget the idea of wearing a bright yellow star on the clothing.
That was for identification so that the individual could be “protected“.
The
Socialist Nazi’s required all of their “enemies” be “protected” by
wearing a large bright yellow badge on the outside of all their clothing
when they went outside.
Or what happened in ISIS occupied Syria…
“Abou Jihad” is a French Islamic State (or ISIL or ISIS) fighter in Syria who is one of the main disseminators of IS materials in French. He is stating openly what mainstream Western media outlets, the United Nations, and the Islamic State itself have now confirmed, namely, that the Islamic State is practicing the sexual enslavement of Yazidi and other non-Muslim women and girls.
Once captured, they can be raped repeatedly, and then sold off as slaves for sex and housework as needed. “Abou Jihad: “350 dollars for the Yazidi girl in Mosul if you want.” was the going rate as of 2014.
Two years later, when Donald Trump become president, and the ISIS lost their funding, support and intelligence from the Obama Administration, the ISIS organization collapsed. Need less to say, the progressive liberals view ISIS activity in Syria to be a “dry run” for what is in store for the United States.
The photo was published on twitter by a Muslim user (@Fadel_alHadidi) and profess to be an ISIS militant marrying a 7-year old kafir in occupied minority district of either Mosul or Syria (source and image is unconfirmed). The child is standing with the ISIS terrorist flag for jihad wrapped around her shoulders. During a forced conversion the victim is made to recite the Quran to make any pedo-marriage halal according to Sharia law.
The government will step in to “protect you”.
Oh yes they will. The media will all discuss how it is so very
important to put you and your family into “protected” farms and camps.
They will televise smiling and happy people boarding buses and trains.
If you don’t go willingly, they will force you. You know, “for your
protection”.
Nazi
Germans rounding up Jews for “their protection”. Those that would not
gather peacefully would be forced into the train cars by force. Know
your history.
Just in case you might think that it would never happen here, you are wrong. It is already happening
here. On certain university campuses, white students are being told
that they must wear a “White Privilege” badge on the outside of their
clothing.
The College Fix is reporting that the Elizabethtown College Democrats want white students to wear White Privilege Pins wherever they go. Covered here at Patriotretort.
So much for “it will never happen here.
A North Carolina “English” “teacher” issued “her” students a work sheet titled “Diversity Inventory”. And then began an in-class exercise requiring high school students to categorize their family, friends, and themselves into several different groups.
Ai! It’s a scene right out of George Orwell’s novel 1984.
“It will never happen here.”
Motherboard then released a report on Tuesday, showing how T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling their customers’ location data, and some of that data was ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and unauthorized people, letting them track virtually any phone in the US.
In Motherboard’s report, the smartphone they located was using the T-Mobile network. For Motherboard's staff to receive the location, the data traveled through a complex system of companies, starting with T-Mobile, before going to a location aggregator called Zumigo.
Zumigo then sold it to a firm called Microbilt, which provides access to a variety of industries, including bounty hunters.
The bounty hunter then sold it to a source, and that source finally sold it to Motherboard.
- AT&T Stops Selling Location Data Of Americans To Bounty Hunters
A free people, living in liberty and freedom are never disarmed. Only prisoners are disarmed. And what happens to prisoners is historically never a good thing. Be advised.
There was a reason that the 2nd Amendment was placed in the Constitution. The mere attempt to regulate it, minimize it, restrict it or impede in the free exercise of it, is a FULL-ON screeching alert that tyranny is present.
And no. I am not talking about the latest encroachments. I am talking about the first encroachments back in the early 1900’s. I am also talking about the FAILURE of our elected officials in allowing all this encroachment.
If the Constitution was being followed as intended, every person in the USA would have access to fully automatic Stoner weapons. Were this to be the case today, there would be ZERO threat of oligarchy initiated genocide in the United States.
Keep in mind this SHTF advice…
Never travel alone or in groups that were too big — always two to three men. All armed, travel swift, in the shadows, cross streets through ruins, not along open streets.There were many gangs 10 to 15 men strong, some as large as 50 men. But there were also many normal men, like you and me, fathers and grandfathers, who killed and robbed. There were no “good” and “bad” men. Most were in the middle and ready for the worst...
-Commonsense Show
Oh, and “they” WILL take your guns away. Just a quick reminder…
I just read a “story”, actually twitter posts, from a “liberal” who has decided not to wait for the red flag laws.
He simply called Child Protective Services and reported he suspected his neighbor of abusing his own pre-teen daughter. Within hours the was a raid, an arrest, a child taken into custody, a life destroyed, and a gleeful follow-up post.
What did the “neighbor” do you ask? His heinous crime? He had a “Trump 2020” sticker on his vehicle. The words “child abuse” get more action than “a man with a gun”. It is harder to defend against. And very seldom verified before the raid.
I really don’t know how to defend against this kind of misuse of the legal system. It’s too late for this “neighbor” but always remember “opsec”. Any ideas?
If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are some
other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might
like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in
America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society
within communist China. As there are some really stark differences
between the two.
More Posts about Life
I have broken
apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions
as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
This is the story about how I got married to my wife in China. As such, this is my dedication to all the others who have to plow through obstacles to be together. Here is what to look out for, and how getting married in China works.
“Sometimes this culture of controlling their kids and who they marry then gets passed down from generation to generation..."
I know all the details are too tedious and boring for casual reading. So I am not going to go into the details.
However, there is a music video 听见下雨的声音 that describes what it was like for me and wife to get married. I want to dedicate this post using this video as the narrative.
This is the way it happened. I tell you the truth.
Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.
Let it be well understood that getting married to the love of my life was was not easy. It wasn’t easy. There were all sorts of hurdles in the way, and yes per Chinese tradition she was to be married off to another boy. This guy was richer, better, more attractive than me.
It was an arrangement made many many years ago. It was made when I was still in elementary school, and while my love knew about it, she somehow felt that she could get around it.
No. She could not.
He was better than me in every measurable way. But somehow we overcame all those obstacles. There is a music video that aptly describes what it was like for us to get together, and I refer to it throughout this post.
Have I been treated unfairly by a boyfriend’s mother because I was not their kind of Asian?
Absolutely! (Two now-ex boyfriends, in fact.)
I was never going to be good enough because I wasn’t the right shade of Asian. I didn’t come from the same background, go to an Ivy League school, or have the right last name.
Yes, my background is certainly more capable than the humble clerk in the music video. Yet, this is a timeless story that others, just like me and my wife, have gone through. This is my dedication to all the others who have to plow through obstacles to be together.
This is my dedication to all the others (maybe others like you, perhaps) who have to plow through obstacles to be together. This is my dedication for all you out there who are in love and are fighting to be together. This is my dedication for you, and for your love.
This boy and this girl loves each other. He is working at a 7-11 as a clerk. He doesn’t make enough money, but he is a hard worker. He is kind, honest, and loyal. She doesn’t love him for his money. She doesn’t love him for his family, the car he drives, or the school he went to. She loves him for who he is.
It’s true.
In fact, if you want to get married to a Chinese guy or girl in China, you WILL need their parents approval. This is codified in law, as well as the documents that all families have. If you get married, your name will go into a household register, and who controls that document? Well… the parents do.
Unless you have their approval, you will not be able to get married in China.
This is because in China, you will need more than love. You will need HEART.
This means that love will not be enough. You will need to make your relationship work. Not only functionally, but you will need to obtain the approval of parents. Many, of whom will have natural biases against you.
These biases are many, and depending on where your love lives, it can include anything from your familial background to your earning potential.
Chinese parents will come with automatic biases that they will judge you by. This will include your earning potential. This will include your intelligence. This will include your family’s social standing, and this will include your ability to be a good provider. Chinese families are traditional.
So yes. You will need to love, and you will need to work. You will need to prove yourself, but also you will need to fight for your love.
More so than Westerners, many Chinese view dating as a pragmatic affair. It’s not always about finding love so much as it is about finding a potential marriage partner who fits with one’s own ideals. For example, although many men get married without a house and a car, Chinese women will often say that they’re looking for these things because that’s the sort of person who probably has a stable career and will be able to provide for her and their future children in the long-term. It’s not always about love. As one contestant on China’s most popular dating show put it, "I’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on a bicycle."
-ThoughtCo
You must, of course, fight. I don’t mean put on some boxing gloves. I mean push yourself, and push yourself to your limits. You need to make the money to prove that you are worthy. You need to be a little better than everyone else. You need to show to your mate that you are worthy of them.
He is a worker. He doesn’t laze around. He works, and earns money. He works at three or four jobs and saves up all his money. (7-11 clerk, deliver food, deliver newspapers, and janitor)
In this video, a poor boy is working all the time so that he can be married to the girl of his dreams. This girl is the one. You know what I am talking about?
The ONE; that one very special person that you want to share your life with.
Ah, but.. But he doesn’t have a college degree. He is of limited means, so he works at what he can do. He works multiple jobs and saves and saves his pennies. He works and works. He does his best, and yes it is dirty, and demeaning work.
But in China, love is not enough to form the basis of a family. You need money, connections and potential. Her father already has picked up a nice promising man for her to marry. Here in the video, he is “interviewing” him as a potential husband for his daughter. This is a often referred to as a “date” in China.
Well, the father does not like him. Instead, he chooses a rich boy, one who is upwardly mobile for his daughter. And she, as a good Chinese daughter, listens to her father.
She obeys her father.
This is a very sweet version of the song from the video, sung by Kiniyo. I place it here so that you, the reader, can listen to it now.
I think Kiniyo does a nice job singing about this very, very common situation that Chinese boys and girls must endure.
This is not fifty years ago. This is today. This is contemporary China, and yes this practice is still very common. It is the most common way for a person to get married in China. However, today (in most of China) they tend to be a little softer about who the daughter is to marry.
As such, they give them a year or two to find a mate. If they don’t find a boy, then the parents will find one for them.
Every parent is different, of course, but in general Chinese parents expect to be more involved in their children’s relationships. It’s not uncommon for parents and grandparents to set their children up on blind dates with suitable matches they’ve found.
If their child’s significant other doesn’t meet with the parents’ approval, continuing the relationship will be very difficult. That’s why if you’re dating someone who is Chinese, it’s very important you make a good first impression with the parents! -ThoughtCo
In richer families, like my wife’s, they are often very strict and particular on who will marry. They are absolute in this regards, most especially if you come from certain regions in China. Like some of the richer sections of Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taiwan, or Beijing. Or in certain provinces or cultural enclaves like Wenzhou.
And, in certain areas (regions) of China, dating a 外国人 (wài guó rén) – a non-Chinese foreigner, is absolutely out of the question.
The father will decide who will marry his daughter.
The father has picked up a socially and financially mobile husband out for her and he tells her that she WILL marry this boy. This is the Chinese way and it is still very common. And yes. It happened to me.
But you know, love is the glue that builds a family. Not a document or diploma. It’s not how good you look or how well connected you are. It is the love that binds the family together and enables the family to persist through hardship.
Love is what you need to make things last decade after decade. Love has a purpose and there is a reason why it exists. When you love someone you are connected to them, and you can “feel” them and what is going on with them.
Yes. You can “feel” them, and this is a real connection.
When you love someone you are “attuned” to that person. You can “feel” them and are aware of them to a certain extent. This awareness varies from person to person, but it does exist.
In China, especially if you come from a wealthy or prominent family, you WILL marry who they tell you to marry. This is the way that it is done, and I can tell you that I encountered this situation personally.
This is what it is like. You need to have parental approval to get married in China.
If you have any questions or confusion about this, then perhaps you should get your head out of the sand and watch the movie “Rich Crazy Asians“. That movie had a number of scenes that really reflected how parents influence the people their children marry.
The Chinese parents exert a tremendous amount of influence on their children. They expect their children to excel in life, and they will make sure and enforce who they will marry.
Crazy Rich Asians is a 2013 novel by Kevin Kwan. Kwan stated that his intention in writing the novel was to "introduce a contemporary Asia to a North American audience". He claimed the novel was loosely based on his own childhood in Singapore. The novel became a bestseller and was followed by two sequels, China Rich Girlfriend in 2015 and Rich People Problems in 2017. A film adaptation of the novel was released on August 15, 2018. -Crazy Rich Asians - Wikipedia
This influence can be an enormous burden and hardship on the child. This is especially true when they love someone, and their parents forbid them to be together. While it is true that many people can get married in China and avoid family approval, this is not true for everyone.
There are still many families that take marriage and future family composition quite seriously.
Midway through Crazy Rich Asians, Michelle Yeoh–who plays the disapproving mother of Constance Wu’s love interest and would-be husband–tells Wu’s character, “You will never be enough.” -Fastcompany
In the MV by Jay Chou titled 听见下雨的声音, this is quite realistically portrayed.
This fact of life, and Chinese truth, can be very difficult. In the case with most Chinese daughters who love another boy, they find that they must marry someone that they do not love. Meanwhile they are forbidden to be with the one who they love.
In the video, the boy saves up all of his money.
That’s what a guy does. he saves up everything and than gives it all to the girl of his dreams. This might sound so strange as it doesn’t fit the progressive liberal reality of what a family is. It is the way traditional families are structures, and in traditional families, the man works as hard as he can and give all of it to his wife.
Not some of it. Not most of it.
All of it.
ALL OF IT.
The boy works hard and gives everything to his girl. In China, a family man gives 100% of what he earns straight to his wife. Not “most” of his money. Not 99.5% of his money. He gives ALL OF HIS MONEY, as his wife and his family is everything to him. That is what a traditional life, and a traditional family is all about.
That is how the dowry came into being. It was a way to show that the boy loves the girl well enough to give everything to her.
That is what a dowry is. But in today’s world, it isn’t enough.
Often in China, the mechanism for getting married was set in place many, many years earlier. The love of your life; your dream girl… THE ONE, might be promised to someone else. And the entire community might know of it. And there might not be anything that you can do about it.
She will be obligated to marry who ever her parents tell her to, or else the entire face of the family will be in jeopardy.
Just like in the English expression “saving face,” the “face” we’re talking about here isn’t a literal face. Rather, it’s a metaphor for a person’s reputation amongst their peers. So, for example, if you hear it said that someone “has face,” that means that they have a good reputation. Someone who doesn’t have face is someone who has a very bad reputation. -Face Culture in China
But life is not that simple.
Love isn’t enough. Money isn’t enough.
You need the blessings of the parents. Without those blessings, you will be absolutely unsuccessful in getting married or having a family register in China. Without a family register, you cannot have children.
This is what a Household Register looks like in China. It is a book. It is kept by your parents, and when you get married, your name and your spouse is added to that register, and your parents keep the book. If they do not approve of your love, you can never get your partner added to the book.
You need the blessings of the parents.
The household register can trace your family’s genealogy back many, many generations.
But, there are often other forces and other situations that will define what happens in your life. There are complex relationships, long held debts, and familial responsibilities that you can be caught up in and not even know about.
The parents will have a duty to make sure that you obey the familial obligations.
The girl is going to her pre-arranged marriage. This is common in China, and this is what happened to us in my life. You might think that this is all a nice made up tale. It isn’t. It is real life in China. It makes us better understand the importance of love and relationships.
But you know, sometimes being wealthy, being kind, saving money, working hard… isn’t enough. The things running against you two being together are too large. The obstacles are too formidable.
The ultimate goal of most relationships in China is marriage. Young Chinese adults are often under a lot of pressure from the elders in their family to find a good husband or wife and get married relatively early.
This pressure is particularly acute for women, who can be called “left-over women” if they pass the age of 26 or 27 without finding a husband. Men can find themselves similarly left-over if they wait too long to get married.
This is a big part of why dating is often taken so seriously. Chinese young people often feel like they don’t have the time to “play the field” that their Western counterparts are afforded by society. -ThoughtCo
Sometimes everything is just impossible to overcome. You cannot do it on your own. All you can do is your best, and often doing it alone won’t be enough.
When that happens, you just cannot give up. You can never give up. You must keep on going and never give up.
I know that it will seem impossible. It will seem difficult, and you will look at what you have; your resources, and see that are are sorely lacking. You will see the world trying, and doing so successfully, to take away what you (in your heart) yearns for.
It doesn’t matter.
You must never give up.
Never. Give. Up.
I am dead-on serious about this. If what you love is so darn important to you then you must fight for it. You must work and strive for a strong life with the one; yes, (here we go again) that ONE person in your life that is THE ONE.
Never. Never ever give up.
You must fight for the things that are important to you.
Seriously. You MUST fight for the things worth having.
You must fight for the important things. And no, often you will not be ready. You won’t have enough money. You won’t have the right job. You won’t have the family blessings. You won’t have what it takes. But…
But… you MUST fight for the things that are important to you.
Well, maybe all your plans fall flat on their face. Maybe everything collapses. Maybe it all goes to deep shit. It doesn’t matter. You keep on fighting for what you love.
One of the great things about love is the strength of it when it is shared. Yes things can be impossible, and the obstacles can be far too great. However, when both of you are working TOGETHER, there is nothing that can come between your love.
As long as both of you…
Both of you share the same kind of love…
It is very easy to follow the parents, peers, and society. But if the love is strong enough, and the heart is fierce enough, you can make decisions before it is too late.
There is nothing that should come between your love for each other. That is why love is so important in a family. It is the glue that outlasts money, that outlasts, beauty and that outlasts family commitments.
But, love will melt away unless you desire it with all of your heart. You will need to make some difficult choices in your life, and there will be others who will not understand. You will need to make them, and it might not be all that easy.
One of the most difficult things that a person might have to do is to disobey their parents and follow their heart. Doing so, especially in Asian cultures, will come at a cost, and there will be a price. But, only you know if it will be worth it. You have to decide. It is a red-pill, a black and white moment.
Things can become uncomfortable. But you know…
The things that are important must be fought for.
In China, and in most of Asia, you might need to disobey your parents. In my case, we ended up getting married in Hong Kong because her parents did not approve of her marriage to an American. I understand that in certain circles in Singapore, or Indonesia it is even stricter with religious and social strata considerations.
And don’t even get me started with India…
The better things in life are the harder to get. Even though your family might want the best for you, only you know in your heart what is important to you. You do need to follow your heart.
Always follow your heart.
Always follow your heart.
Your heart will tell you what to do. Your feelings and your emotions will guide you. Listen to them.
You need to listen to your feelings.
Remember, feelings and emotions, are the glue that hold families together. When you are younger, the emotions are very strong. There is a biological reason for this. Use it.
Listen to your feelings.
Follow them and let them lead you.
When there are things that matter to you, you need to FIGHT for them. You just cannot be passive about the things that are important to you. You must fight for the things that have meaning, and others might be hurt in the process. But you need to put your needs first.
And just like the music video… and just like the fairy tales… there actually can be a “happily ever after”. Just remember that you need to fight for the things that matter to you, and if you find the ONE… that ONE person that you want to spend the rest of your life with, then both of you should fight together.
You can achieve your dreams when both of you two are fighting together for the same thing…
There can be a happily ever after. You just need to believe and follow through. Don’t give up. Don’t you ever give up. If there is one thing worth fighting for in this earth it is LOVE.
If there is one thing worth fighting for in this earth… it is love.
I really believe that if both of you share the same emotions, and both of you are willing to have a traditional, conservative family with a solid grounding in familial roles, there will be nothing that you cannot accomplish. [This is not a political issue. Many progressive democrats have conservative, traditional families. Like the Obama’s for instance.]
A traditional, conservative family is a time-tested 100% guarantee of family success with over 5000 years of documented proof. It is a family where the man works and gives 100% of his labors to this family. The wife handles the budget, the household and teaches the children.
While you might end up fighting against the wishes and desires of the parents to get married, do not neglect the importance of your new family. Establish it with a solid foundation.
Love.
And they lived happily ever after. And no it’s not a fairy tale. This is real life you all. This is the real deal. This is what happened in my life, and this is what can happen in your life as well.
Fairy tales DO come true. There is, actually is, a rainbow with a pot of gold under it.
Conclusion
My life was from my time and based on my situation. I could get all involved telling the story about this conditions, and that condition, as every situation is complex. There is nothing really simple about relationships. Once you start documenting your own, you will find that it gets complex really… really quickly.
Yet, fundamentally, my story is one of love and cultural complexities. In fact, I think that a foreigner marrying an Asian, whether they are from China or some other nation, will also encounter some situations of relative similarity to mine.
And yes, while I wrote this little post about myself, it’s really about YOU the reader.
I want to impress to you that you, I mean everyone, needs to have the fundamentals in their life “locked down”, put in place and secured. That means a life and relationship founded on love, and created with a solid emotional foundation, and structured in a proven traditional way.
It’s a winning combination.
It really is.
It is a little like this…
The Video that I refer to.
In this post I repeatedly referred to a music video (MV) that I believe reflects the story that I am trying to relate. Earlier in the post, I embedded the song sung by Kiniyo. I think that she really “nailed” the emotions and the feelings of the situation quite clearly. Indeed, if you want to get “goosebumps” on you arms, you should go to a concert where everyone is singing this song together.
Who says that this is an uncommon experience?
Like this version of the song sung by A-Lin. Watch the people in the audience. Yes, this situation is more common that we in the West would assume. Check it out…
If you are so inclined, you can see the lyrics (in Chinese) alongside the English translation HERE.
A non-Asian views the video
The thing is that this is Asian – Chinese culture. It is difficult for a non-Asian to understand it. They will make all kinds of inaccurate assumptions on what is going on.
Here we see an American chick watching the MV movie and is confused by what is going on.
An American girl comments on the video when viewing it the first time. She does so based upon the visual clues and makes erroneous assumptions as she does not understand Chinese Asian culture.
Yes, she understands that the father doesn’t like the boy, and that they are rich, but she doesn’t understand that she MUST obey her father. And, she doesn’t understand that they are meeting at her house simply because that is the place where they can meet. (She orders take-out just so that she can meet him.)
Oh, and that “store” where she get the top is not a store. It’s her father’s factory, and she picked out a top for the boy to wear, and the father says no. So, it is not just any store.
Even seeing the MV, and not understanding the lyrics or the cultural framework, you can be well moved by the video.
No, girl, it’s not as easy as you think.
She doesn’t understand that the boy is working four jobs, it’s not an option for him. And that mark on his face is a birthmark, and yes there are many people in China that have these.
She doesn’t understand that this is a formal arranged marriage, and who cares if he is handsome, wealthy and your parents like him. If there is no love, there cannot be a family.
To truly understand what is going on and why, you need to have some understanding of Asian culture. This is NOT America. This is China, and things can be very complicated.
She doesn’t understand that when the girl gets out of the car and runs to the boy it is not a cliché, that there are a lot of things going on and risks that she is taking are serious ones. This is not America, girl. This is China.
She might hate the story line because it is so cliché, but this is China today, and these things and events do actually happen. Maybe not in America they don’t, but in China they most especially do happen.
And yes, happy endings do actually happen.
Oh, BTW, I'm not trying to get in her grill. She just doesn't understand Chinese - Asian culture, and thus missed some of the important elements of the story. Besides, later on she comments on another one of my favorite Jay Chou videos. And, it's closer to what is going on.
The Song the MV is based upon.
This is a live version by Jay Chou.
Afterwards
After the hardship will be a period of calm and happiness. I promise.
It happened to me, and it will happen to you.
About Traditional Families
I am a big believer that you must build up a life with the ONE who you love. As such, there is a time-tested method to make your love last a lifetime.
That method is known as the “traditional conservative” method.
The trouble is that it is just about extinct in the United States today. It is not taught anywhere, and there are all sorts of distortions of what it actually is. Well I talk about it and go into get lengths to explain it.
You can read about it here…
Links about China
China and America Comparisons
The Chinese Business KTV Experience
This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.
Learning About China
Contemporaneous Chinese Music
This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.
Parks in China
Articles & Links
You’ll not
find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
Here we discuss the two types of families. There are really only two ways to run a family. There are no “shades of grey” in this matter. Families are run in either one or the other methods.
Throughout all of human history, and all over the world (independent of culture), families fall into only two distinct categories. These categories are simple but fundamental.
Ordered, structured family (traditional)
Unordered, and unstructured family (progressive)
This information is not available anywhere else! As far as I know, this is the only place where you will find this information in English, and devoid of any religious dogma.
But first…
Let’s cover why this information is not easily available.
Technical Confusion
The fundamental two types listed above describe how the families operate.
But, this is of no concern to governments. They want methods to make it easy to classify families to tax them, to “improve their lives”, or to provide substantive benefits to.
They have devised other methods.
These other ways are complex and serve no purpose other than to confuse. In these other arrangements, you have families classified by the number and types of children, and the marriage states of the primary caregivers, as well as the gender variations, present in the families. It is silly. Really.
All are nonsensical as far as the operation of a family goes.
It is like arguing over the benefits of the percentage of chocolate in brownies.
They are nonsensical simply because the classifications have no practicality. At least from the point of view of the people within the families. This type and kind of classification has limited utility.
They are useful by government agencies in the distribution of benefits. They are useful in the creations of studies and academic papers. However, in terms of the lifestyle and benefits of the families themselves, this classification has no benefit.
You can scour the internet looking in a vague hope towards understanding the fundamental nature of human families. You can search and search. But you won’t ever find out why human families form relationships and parental units. Nor will you discover the forms that they take and why. Instead, you will find all sorts of trivialities. Just useless information. Useless.
Is your life improved by knowing these various classifications? If so, please tell me how.
It’s sort of like classifying dogs.
Dogs are big, or small.
Dogs have hair or not.
Dogs have different colored patterned fur, or not.
Dogs can bark, or not.
In the case of human families and their familial arrangements, you will come across terms of “nuclear family”, and “extended family” and “foster family”, etc. These different titles only serve government agencies for the distribution of welfare benefits, they do not address familial operation.
For in familial operation, all families can be classified in but one of two distinctly different types.
The Two Classifications
The two types of classifications of what a family is are very straight forward.
Humans form one of two types of families. There are no “shades of grey” in this matter. They are either [1] traditional, conservative families or [2] progressive, liberal families.
While there are variations in both types of families given cultural, social, and ethnic norms, for the most part there are two, and ONLY two types of families.
Here we discuss the two types.
A Changing Ideal – Progressive
Let’s start with the prevalent type in America today. This is the progressive liberal family structure.
It was not always this way. To understand why it is this way today, you need to know a little about American history.
This is a recent familial structure.
Historically, Americans have overwhelmingly had a Conservative Traditional familial structure for the last two hundred years. However, all this started to change around the first decade of 1900. The major driver for this change was the destruction of the 4th amendment when the 16th amendment was passed, and the imposition of the income tax burden and the Federal Reserve.
Taxes, in every nation on the planet, always devolves to taxing the poor while providing benefit to the wealthy. This is a historical fact. No wishful thinking can change that reality.
This legislation eroded the strength of a traditional conservative family unit. Both parents had to work to pay the tax burden. For once it became acceptable to tax and regulate, everything became taxed and regulated.
Fees and charges started to pop up everywhere, and it became no longer viable to maintain a traditional conservative family in the Untied States. This is because in a traditional conservative family, one person works outside the home. Not two.
Once it became acceptable to tax, an avalanche of taxation and regulation fell upon the American citizenry.
Whether intentional or as a consequence of the actions from Washington DC, American families started to restructure the family. They restructured the family around the constantly evolving financial realities of the United States.
It wasn’t only federal taxes. It was ever increasing state taxes; ever increasing regulation and fees. All of which were making things more expensive. Not to mention the absolutely incompetent managing of the American dollar by the corrupt Federal Reserve.
How can you deny my narrative…
The value of the United States dollar has plummeted in value ever since the Federal Reserve managed it. This is a historical fact. The value of the US dollar today is less than one penny compared to what it was when the Federal Reserve was created.
As the Federal Reserve managed the money, inflation skyrocketed. the value of the dollar decreased, and it became absolutely necessary for both parents to work.
America has been decaying rapidly since the 1950s with almost every aspect of society failing—and things are only about to get even worse. While this is a showcase of how good things can be lost so easily, it is also a demonstration of what can be possible under a patriarchal order with proper social values.
While things may seem impossible to change at the moment, remember that history has always been full of unanticipated events that quickly turned things around to transform the society at large.
Think of how much China has recovered (and now thriving) since their devastating Communist past from just a few decades ago.
As the parents labored outside of the home, no one was there in the home. There was no one establishing roles, rules or standards for the children to learn and abide by.
The absolute “killing blow” to traditional family life in America came about int he 1970’s when the SJW feminist movement became popularized and promoted in the mainstream media. A collapse of the traditional family came shortly afterwards.
This is a chart of the divorce rate in the United States over time. You can clearly see that the SJW feminist movement during the 1970’s played a major role in the divorce rate in America and the reduction on parental education for the children.
Without parents around to teach the children, the children were forced to learn on their own.
Instead, the Children learned, not from their parents, but rather from what was at hand and available to them. Often this was other children and the television and movies.
Television portrayed what life was.
Other children portrayed how to live life.
School teachers instructed how to behave.
As a result it became normal (in the United States) to have families with no structure. And thus, we have the situation today in most homes in the United States…
The Progressive Liberal Family Structure
A “Progressive Liberal” family unit is one without structure.
We pretty much never had sit-down family meals, and if we did it was from a restaurant, we ate in silence, and then we’d just wander off from the table one by one to watch TV or go on the computer or something. It’s not that we hate each other or anything, it’s just pretty much the way it’s always been.
-PolkaDotsOnThursday
All or no family members might work. There are no rules, or if there are rules, they are temporary and subject to change. In a progressive liberal family, the structure, organization, and behavior of the family are all constantly changing.
In a progressive liberal family, there is no structure. They may or may not be male and female member that take on parental roles. In this case above, there isn’t a father figure or earner. The family exists off the government dole. The children learn that earning money is not necessary to have such a family, as all they need to do is procreate and ask for money from the government.
This has been the primary and dominant structure in the United States since the SJW feminist movement of the 1960s.
In a progressive liberal family, typically both the male and the female might work or not. (Though, there might be not any differences in gender, though.) There will not be any roles, gender or rules.
The earnings of each worker are not shared. It is kept by the individual. Though there is often some kind of sharing arrangement for the payment of rent, and how to take care of the children. Which, at the whim of the individual members, might change without notice.
The feminist movement in the 1970s in the United States started off innocently enough. They just wanted “equality” and “fairness”. However, their true desires took decades to place a stranglehold on American society. They wanted a total abolition of roles. And in the process, a complete destruction of any kind of stable society.
Often the individual members of a progressive liberal household will have a very positive view of their opinions and their “open mindedness”. They desire to prove to others that their familial organization and their roles within it are superior to others. Often believing in their own superiority.
Often the individual roles within a family are promoted as superior to traditional roles. The participants look upon themselves are heroes or heroines fighting tradition.
The primary characteristics of a progressive liberal family is one of independence. If you need your clothes washed, you wash them yourself. Yes, you can add the clothing of others to your load, if room permits, but the primary characteristic is one of selfish independence.
This trickles down into everything.
There are no roles or responsibilities, at least not formal ones. If the room is messy, you clean it when needed. If a chore needs to be taken cared for, your deal with it only when necessary. If bills need to be paid, they are rarely shared, but rather the primary user of that monetary allotment is responsible for the billing.
When there are no rules and no structure, people become confused and try to do unusual things to stand out from the crowd. This can manifest into all kinds of anti-social behaviors. In traditional conservative societies, people like this are segregated from society and isolated so that their mental illness will not affect those around them.
Clothing is often an afterthought. People wear the same clothes outside as they do inside. The same goes for shoes. Often underwear is infrequently washed, and shoes are rarely shined or repaired.
Children are not cared for in any meaningful way. That role is farmed out. Whether it is via a day-care, a nanny, or a school, the parents rarely take responsibility for their children. They allow others and permit others to teach and direct their children. The role of parenting is often outsourced.
Meals are often purchased through restaurants or take out. Rarely they are prepared at home. If they are, then it is unusual for them to be anything other than “my food for me”. Family meals are not shared activities. Most progressive liberal families have a diet that relies heavily on fast-food, snacks and easy to make home preparations.
When there are no limits, and no rules you can live the way that you decide. This can often be unhealthy. Without any kind of discipline by a strong fatherly figure, the children can grow into adults that have no understanding of good or the dangers of bad behaviors.
Meals can be eaten anywhere, and often are. While there might be a “dining room”, most meals are eaten alone in front of a television set, or a computer. They can be eaten in the living room, or bed room, or standing up in the kitchen.
"The so-called "sexual revolution" intentionally destroyed all of the social constructs that had been put together over thousands of years of human history."
-Karl Denninger at Market-Ticker
The truth about the progressive family and the progressive woman, as viewed by a traditional conservative.
Traditional Conservative
A traditional gender role found in the United States that views males as being responsible for the economic support and protection of the family. Housewife. A traditional gender role found in the United States that views females as responsible for child-rearing and domestic activities.
In a traditional, and conservative family there is a structure. There are roles. There are rules of behavior. This might vary somewhat, in minor differences, from one society to another, but the basic organizational structure stays the same.
The father supports the family monetarily.
The mother supports the family domestically.
A traditional gender role found in the United States that views males as being responsible for the economic support and protection of the family. Housewife. A traditional gender role found in the United States that views females as responsible for child-rearing and domestic activities.
This is the basic setup. The father might be a construction worker, or a college professor. He might be rich or poor. He might be religious or agnostic, but the family unit is timeless.
Here is an Amish family that maintains a traditional family…
The Amish family follows the traditional conservative familial structure. There is a father that works and provides for the family, and a mother that tends to the domestic matters and their children.
In a traditional family unit, the father or male head of the household works and labors. His earnings, or the result of his efforts, are given to his wife & family. This includes the vast bulk of his earnings. This includes his time, his relationships, and all of his attention.
Make no mistake about this. All of his money goes to his family.
This financial arrangement where the finances are controlled by the wife is time tested. The wife, who is in control of the finances, budgets for the well being of the man, and the children. She plans. She saves and she supports the man in what ever he needs to be able to make more money.
God forbid I go into someplace like Harbor Freight with a big wad of cash.
Yeah, give me a sec and I’ll back right up to the front door to making loading all this crap I don’t need into the back of my rig easier.
This is why the Wifely Unit takes care of the money around here. I’m horrible about that shit . That is why our bills get paid on time and why I now actually have a killer credit score.
-Busted Knuckles
The wife, thusly, takes the money and maintains the family with it. She provides the food, cares for the children, makes sure the household is maintained, and the family standing with the rest of the community.
She in in charge of how the children grow and develop. As a result, a mother in a conservative family will tend to be less protective of her children. Instead, wanting them to have the scrapes and cuts early on to learn from the experience.
A progressive mother, one who farms out the parenting responsibilities, will try to coddle the child and protect them at the expense of teaching them. Which is why in the United States today, you have overly coddled youth.
The conservative traditional mother is responsible for the growth and development of the child. It is not farmed out to others.
The mother is responsible for the care, well-being and the education of the children. While this will include the schooling, the mother will make sure that the child excels in school compared to the child’s peers.
Traditionally, the Seneca Nation's economy was based on hunting and gathering activities, fishing and the cultivation of corn, beans, and squash. These vegetables were the staple of the Haudenosaunee diet and were called "the three sisters".
Seneca women generally grew and harvested varieties of the three sisters, as well as gathered medicinal plants, roots, berries, nuts, and fruit.
Seneca women held sole ownership of all the land and the homes, thus the women also tended to any domesticated animals such as dogs and turkeys.
Women were in charge of the kinship groups called clans. The woman in charge of a clan was called the "clan mother". Despite the prominent position of women in Iroquois society, their influence on the diplomacy of the nation was limited.
If the "clan mothers" did not agree with any major decisions made by the chiefs, they could eventually depose them.
Seneca men were generally in charge of locating and developing the town sites, including clearing the forest for the production of fields. Seneca men also spent a great deal of time hunting and fishing. This activity took them away from the towns or villages to well-known and productive hunting and fishing grounds for extended amounts of time. These hunting and fishing locations were altered and well maintained and not simply left to grow as "wild" lands.
-Great Dreams discussing the role of women in a traditional conservative Seneca society.
Same-sex conservative family
A traditional conservative family can ALSO be one with same-sex parenting roles.
In same-sex parenting schemes, a traditional conservative family would have one parent taking on the role as the “father” and the “breadwinner”, while the other partner takes on the role of the “mother” and takes on the domestic chores.
It is not gender specific.
It really isn’t. The conservative traditional lifestyle is actually same-sex friendly. It is role dependent. Not gender dependent.
In same-sex parenting schemes, a traditional conservative family would have one parent taking on the role as the “father” and the “breadwinner”, while the other partner takes on the role of the “mother” and takes on the domestic chores.
The primary characteristics of a traditional conservative family is one of rules and roles. The father earns the money. The mother takes care of the house, the domestic affairs and the children.
The father earns the money that the household lives off of. In traditional families, he gives 100% of his income to his family. This often is handed to the wife who is in charge of the budget.
Of course, the father will take on male responsibilities as needed. This often includes discipline, motivation, and the various tasks required to teach a boy how to be a man. Not to mention being a role model for his daughters; to teach them what characteristics to look for, and which ones to avoid, in a boy.
Families need both a nurturing female mother figure as well as a strong male fatherly figure in their lives. Both roles are important. The progressive liberal narrative is one where this dichotomy is portrayed as evil, such as in the Gillette razor commercial. But this is a terrible distortion of reality.
Men need to be strong and courageous.
Children need both parents to grow up in a balanced way. Perhaps one of the best movies to portray this need is the 1990’s movie “Boyz in the Hood“.
The mother will be responsible for good nutritious meals.
That includes household budgeting, selection of what the family eats, and the preparation and presentation of the food. In many conservative traditional households there is a formal sit-down meal where everyone shares and enjoys the time together.
In fact, I will go out on a limb here and state that this is one of the defining criteria used to determine the type of family that is present in a household.
Our dinner hour continued my Italian family's practice of eating together every night - plus big gatherings on Sunday afternoons. For our own dinner hour, the time between 6 and 7 p.m. was inviolable - as in "sacrosanct" - and all my kids' friends knew about it. No phone calls, but the friends had a standing invitation to join us. Besides the meal, the table was set for our humanity; we talked, laughed, fought, yelled and even cried. So indelible was the dinner hour that Carla wrote about it for a college admission essay.
Leah, a close childhood friend, chimed in: "My mom was super militant about the family dinner and she was an amazing cook who had the time to plan lovely dinners so it always worked out. I loved it and remembered it fondly with the goal in mind to replicate.
However my babysitter leaves at 5 p.m., and I am a decent cook who basically has an hour and change to whip something together for the family. I am with Jenna, in that my goal is try to do proper family dinner three to four times a week, and the rest of the time we wing it. If Mike is on the road like this week, I cook for the kids but eat my dinner standing at the kitchen counter."
-SF Gate
The wife will have end-of-day clothing laid out for the man of the house, and for the children to wear when they arrive home. Shoes will rarely be worn inside, instead slippers or shower-shoes will be worn instead.
The father has an important role in the growth of the children. Both the boys and the girls benefit from his guidance and his leadership and direction. He teaches discipline and control. When you come across a child who ill-behaves in school and society, seemingly devoid of discipline, then you know that he has no (or a very weak) father figure in his life.
The wife will be responsible for holidays and family traditions. This will include decorations and festivities whatever they might be.
The wife is in charge of the diets for the family members. She is responsible for the food, selection, and preparation. She will make sure that the family gets nutritious and delicious meals. She will often have meals of fish, chicken and salads as opposed to fast food and pizza meals.
The family members would eat roasts, pork chops, have mashed potatoes and cabbage as sides along with peas and other fresh vegetables that the woman would prepare. Since everyone is eating healthy, it would be highly unusual for the children or any of the family members to get fat, let alone obese.
In a traditional household, the wife would be responsible for what the family members would eat. It is her duty to make sure that the family is healthy. Traditional conservative families do not have the weight problems that the rest of America experience.
Because of the importance placed upon the family unit; the food, the structure, the roles and the lifestyle, will often be healthier than in a progressive liberal lifestyle. While there might be standards in longevity, the quality of life and general health of people in a conservative traditional household far exceeds that of someone from a progressive liberal household.
This is a series of screen shots of newscaster Yang Dan in China. She, like most Chinese, lives a traditional conservative lifestyle. It is one of family, strong family and friend relationships, a lack of stress and an avoidance of disruptive escapist behaviors. It seems like she doesn’t age. That is simply because she has a supportive conservative, traditional family. She has friends and a life that includes good nutritious food and healthy social life.
In traditional conservative families, “outside meals” held in restaurants are a special event. And when that event happens, the restaurants are selected carefully with the idea of ceremony. It is not an afterthought. Though, fast food might be eaten from time to time, it is not considered to be “a meal”.
In fact, junk food is rarely tolerated outside of special occasions and carefully metered by the woman of the house. For instance, if potato chips are served, it would be with a healthy dip. If hamburgers are cooked it will be part of a BBQ get-together. If pizza is served, there will be a salad, and fruit with it.
Orange juice with water instead of soda pop.
Grapes and peanuts on the table instead of candy.
Leftovers in the fridge for easy quick snacks.
Banning of certain unhealthy foods.
Metered access to heavy sugar-rich foods.
In a traditional household, the woman would prepare the lunches for the family where possible. If the mother decides that the school lunches are adequate, she may opt to allow the children to eat outside the family home. But, the meals would need to pass her muster first.
She would also be in charge of what the man of the house eats.
The Woman is in charge…
She is in charge of what he eats, what he wears, how he wears it, and his behavior in public. The man, with full trust of his wife, would follow her instructions and direction as he knows that she has every faith in his ability to concentrate on making money without the other distractions that could tear away from his attention.
It is easier on the man this way.
His stress level goes way down when he knows that his home is his refuge and everything is taken cared for. He can concentrate on the business tasks at hand; making money for his family.
"After three years of happy marriage, and getting stressed out by her job in a busy payroll department, she decided in 2018 to turn back time — and live like a 1950s housewife.
That’s when Holte, 30, transformed her Hillsboro, Oregon, home into a suburban shrine to the pre-ERA era, busying herself cleaning, making dresses using vintage patterns — and getting dinner on the table by the time her husband, Lars, 28, gets home from his job as an engineering manager.
“I feel like I’m living how I always wanted to. It’s my dream life and my husband shares my vision,” she says as a vinyl Doris Day soundtrack plays in the background. “It is a lot of work. I do tons of dishes, laundry and ironing, but I love it and it’s helping to take care of my husband and that makes me really happy.”
- The woman quits her job to spoil her husband like a 1950s housewife
This is how a traditional conservative household works. No, it is not like the horrible image from Hollywood like what is portrayed in “The Handmaids Tale”. It is instead a shared responsibilities that leverages the strengths of each partner equally.
Often, a woman will choose a career over family. This means, out of necessity, that she will have a progressive liberal family structure. This is how it works.
All of this seems so old fashioned to us Americans, but that is only because we have been living in a progressive liberal society for at least five decades if not longer. (Sorry to say, and I know many of the conservative readership do not want to hear this.)
The truth is that this is the way that families run their affairs in traditional conservative societies. Such as China. Such as Poland. Such as Zambia. Such as Russia. Such as Bulgaria.
The traditional conservative family in Zambia Africa. This is the primary family unit.
Comparisons
There are various memes that you can find on the internet that makes comparisons between the type types of families. They are often make between the ways it manifest individually. Here, the message is stark and harsh.
Internet meme comparing the woman’s role in a progressive liberal household, compared to that of a traditional conservative household. The comparisons are stark.
The comparisons between the two different types of families are very start and obvious. Here is a very “quick and dirty” summary of just some of the characteristics that can be used to compare the two different types of families.
Comparative Table
Attribute
Progressive
Conservative
Meals
Fast Food/Snacks
Planned & Healthy
Clothing
As needed
Cleaned & pressed
Family Roles
None
Defined
Household
Place to sleep
Refuge
Family Rules
None
Defined & Strict
Family Support
None
Complete
Multi-generational
Rare
Common
Budget
None
Maintained
Children
Farmed out
Supervised
It is interesting to note that most of the wealthiest families in the United States maintain a traditional conservative family household. This includes those that (for various political reasons) strongly support a progressive liberal household lifestyle for the vast bulk of Americans. While they themselves maintain a conservative traditional household behind closed doors.
Some things that a Progressive Liberal family cannot do
Once a family falls into the progressive liberal “trap”, they will have a difficult time enforcing any type of traditional conservative family rules. It’s simple really. When people live a life without rules, they resent any rules when they are put in place. It’s human nature.
Thus, here are some things that progressive liberal families have to struggle with. Traditional conservative families won’t experience these problems.
The things that progressive liberal families have trouble with include…
Formal dinners at dinner time. Most progressive liberal families have a very difficult time with this. They find it difficult to set aside time and have difficulty in getting everyone to recognize the importance of communal dinners. When they do manage to set time aside, it is often short, and the experience becomes a mere formality. It is never a daily event.
Chores and roles. Progressive liberal families are disgusted by roles and greatly resent taking on any kind of responsibility. they have a very negative view of any kind of male or female role and avoid it where at all possible. As a result, the household tends to become cluttered, messy, dirty, and disheveled.
Saving Money. Most progressive liberal families have an understanding that what a person earns is theirs to do with they wish. Thus it is very difficult for them to save money. Especially saving money for family purposes.
Discipline. When children are raised in a progressive Liberal household; one where there are no rules, the children become unruly and directionless. They often develop emotional and behavioral issues. This becomes a burden to the rest of the family.
Romantic Dreams
As a child, we naturally yearn for the conservative traditional lifestyle and way of life. Women yearn to have a child and look for a man “who will be theirs and theirs alone. A man who gives them everything they have and more“. This is a traditional conservative lifestyle.
In a traditional conservative man, he yearns for (what we men refer to) as “the one”. The one woman who would understand him. The one woman who he can say anything to, and be totally accepted for who he is. A woman who would never say anything bad about him, not to his face, and most certainly not behind his back. He yearns for a woman who would “have his back”, and he would give her his everything.
He would give her his love, and no one else would get it. He would give her all his money. All of it. Every cent, and allow her to invest it, budget it, and utilize it. She would be the one.
Men desire a faithful wife, and a strong family. He wants to do his best at work, and then when he comes home, he desires a place to call his own.
In a world where everyone from his boss to the rules and regulations at HR, to the government, has something to say about him and how he lives his life. Where they say how he can dress, cut his hair, trim his beard, and park his car. Where they can tell him what to do with his time, and yell at him and punish him for things beyond his control. He needs to know that “his home is his castle“. A place, a refuge, where he is the king and treated as such.
The traditional conservative lifestyle and family provides this.
Elements of a Conservative Traditional Home
You might find the following characteristics within a traditional conservative household…
“His” chair.
“Her” bathroom.
House shoes beside the front door.
A pantry that is full. (A consequence of budgeting.)
Well behaved, and respectful, children.
Hours where the kitchen is “closed” from use.
Formal sit-down meals.
China
I like to use China as the benchmark in this regard. But other conservative nations are the same such as Poland.
Women’s role / Man’s role – There is a clear line in what is expected of both sides. However, where some feminist may find it offensive, I love it! Sure no problem I can clear the dishes off the table and clean and put them away, but you can go outside and pick up the dog poo, mow the lawn, and vacuum the stairs.
-One Month in Poland
There are social services in Poland. However, there is nothing like the need as in the Americas. Think of the Amish.
The adults take care of the young and the young take care of the old. In Poland families stay together, no matter what.
They help even more distant relatives. Women do not divorce their men and take care of them and so there are no broken families. Of course there are social problems but because of the stronger family structure nothing like you find in the West. People take care of each other.
-Why living in Poland is like living in Hollywood
There are some very good reasons for using Poland as an example. Take note. They are [1] a world power, they are [2] traditional and [3] have moved away from socialist communist progressive liberal behaviors in the late 1970s and [4] fully embraced traditional (Chinese) conservative lifestyles.
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China is a very traditional and conservative nation.
The family units are all traditional and conservative, and they safeguard and maintain this role with a degree of intensity that is surprising. One of the most surprising aspects of this role is the acceptance of historical and period costumes and roles.
The Chinese love the role play and you can often see them in public taking on the traditional conservative role for all to see and record. It’s kind of amazing to me, and so I am presenting it here. Yes, most Chinese wear conventional clothing and work clothing. However, there is a serious love for Chinese history and the Chinese culture that transcends my ability to vociferate.
The Chinese LOVE their history. They love their nation. They love their lifestyle.
Here are some examples…
I love how the little children watch transfixed while the couple hugs each other. Don’t you think that this will make a lasting impression that they will carry on with them when they get older?
It’s sort of like how the welfare mothers influence their children to ask for free stuff from the government. As it is their birthright.
This is different, in that you want to reinforce the positive. You want to mitigate the negative, and provide direction, hope and rules for young impressionable people to follow.
Here’s another couple. This time it is a mother and her child in a park. To us, from the West, this seems so odd and silly. But this happens in China, and no it’s not all that rare. Role-play is increasingly becoming common place and fits the Chinese lifestyle.
It’s an Asian thing. Just like the people in Japan like to dress up in traditional clothing. Just like they do in Thailand, and just like they do in Korea.
A traditional conservative life is viewed as something that is fundamentally important for familial success in life.
And… here’s a grocery store. Check out the other people in the market.
You know, pay attention to the reactions of the workers in the grocery store. It’s the same thing all over China. When you dress up in traditional Chinese clothes, everyone loves to watch you. China is a nation where there is no such thing as “cultural appropriation”.
They love their culture and wish to reinforce it.
I dare say, can you just imagine trying to do this in the United States? You might end up with a 500 pound pink-hair water buffalo accusing you of “cultural misappropriation”.
Just some American shoppers in Walmart. Once taxation was declared legal, a small army of tax enthusiasts devoted their lives to squeezing every drop of earnings from the American people. This activity severely impacted the life and lifestyles of Americans, and has thus manifested in the America that you see today. The best parade of progressive liberal family members can be easily viewed at any Walmart.
High School graduation. No progressive liberals here…
And of course, here is a mother with her son at an airport. In China. You will note how well behaved the baby is, and how demure the mother is. This is the picture of a traditional conservative family structure.
It is COMMON all over China.
In America, the progressive family is what is most common. You can see the influence of it everywhere. From Walmart to CNN. From the people elected to Congress to the condition of the roads and what happens to new capital projects… such as high-speed rail.
Notice how she doesn’t buy fast food for them to snack on. Instead, she goes to a juice bar and gets some fresh healthy juice. A mother is responsible for the health and well-being of everyone in the household.
It is her duty.
Conclusion
Because the girls take so good care of you, make you feel happy, like a real man and the boss in the relationship and in turn expect you to support them financially that makes them bad girls? That’s complete nonsense.
If someone doesn’t like the idea of giving and taking then maybe he’s better off dating an American, British, German, French, or Australian woman who works full time, brings in decent money but then expects you to do half of the household, half of the cooking, half of the dish washing, half of the children duties, half of everything. And doesn’t take care and show interest in you nearly as much as a Khmer girl would do it on a daily basis.
-Cambodia Red Cat
Life is about living. Many times we have adjusted to the life that we lived simply without thinking. We never considered what it must have been like for our parents or our grandparents when they were our age. We don’t give it any thought. We just accept what is, and assume that things have always been this way.
It need not be this way.
Look at the world around you. Appreciate it more. Appreciate your family more, and your friends more. Understand that the life that you are living now does not have to be the life that you must have. You can change it. You can make the life into an ideal that you want.
You just need to know a little bit about your family history and why things are the way that they are. With that knowledge comes power, and ultimately…
Change.
A Final Word
The traditional conservative family is prevalent all over the world because it works. It works successfully, and enables a family to thrive together through all the changes that it might encounter.
Non-traditional family structures have been tried all over the world. They have been tried, and documented, as far back as the middle ages, and they have always failed. They eventually die out.
The family members all eventually set up their own families and follow the traditional conservative model.
The Reason for this is simple.
For a progressive liberal family structure to persist through social upheavals and change, it requires outside assistance. The family unit is not cohesive. It is “every man for himself”. This reliance on outside assistance is fatal. Most especially when all the surrounding families are also progressive liberal in composition.
The over riding purpose behind a strong family unit is longevity. Progressive liberal families have a track record that lasts in years, few last longer than a decade. While traditional conservative families have exceedingly long periods of longevity. Often lasting centuries.
It’s all about this…
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are some
other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might
like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in
America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society
within communist China. As there are some really stark differences
between the two.
More Posts about Life
I have broken
apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions
as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are
reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly
impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal
library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come
and enjoy a read or two as well.
Here are (what I like to call) “snapshots” of the Chinese New Year celebrations in February 2019. The Chinese use a lunar calendar, and the New Year started on 5FEB19, and started the week-long celebration.
This celebration is profoundly different than anything experienced in the West. It is a time of family and friends. It is a time of crazed dancing, and orgy of food, and prolonged heavy drinking. It is also a time when you will see friendships renew, relationships expand, and families strengthen.
The cultural aspects of this event are (in large part) unknown in the West, but I find them fascinating. Everything from the “spontaneous dancing upon arrival”, grain alcohol guzzling, monkey parades, and the barbecued octopus tentacles dipped in hot spicy pepper sauce becomes commonplace during this time.
Here we look at a series of scenes from China. All of the scenes are in the form of micro-videos. All videos were taken within the week of 3FEB19 through 8FEB19 and represent a cross-section of typical China as observed by typical Chinese using their cellphones. The application used to record these videos is the TikTok APP.
Travel
While officially, the week vacation is a full week, many businesses and factories stay shut down for an entire month. They work reduced shifts leading up to, and after the official holiday. They also rely on reduced staffing during this period, as most Chinese travel great distances from their employer to go back home for the holidays.
Of course, the traffic is crazy and the crowds are massive. It is very difficult to get a plane seat, or a seat on the train as literally millions of people are moving here and there, to and from, leading up to the Chinese New Year holiday. As a result, many hop in their cars and drive for two or three days to make it back home.
Here’s a video of what it is like. Of course, there are often instances of heavy traffic, and other frustrations of driving long distances…
To save on the expense, they often share the ride with other similar people traveling in the general direction. For instance, this year, one of my product engineers drove home and shared a ride with a fellow from Guangzhou. He lived in a nearby town, and was a friend of a friend.
Impromptu and spontaneous dancing upon entry
Of course, it is always great to see loved ones. But, the Chinese do so with a new twist. many Chinese like to welcome each other with a dance. I kid you not, and when that happens, you are obligated to go ahead and dance with them.
Now, the reader should be aware that this is not a traditional thing to do. At least, I don’t think it is traditional. It seems to have cropped up literally “out of the blue” this year, and is all over the social media. Yeah. I know, it’s silly.
But then, on the other hand, it is certainly memorable…
I really do not know where this all got started from. It seems like everyone is able to take part in it. From little kids, to school boys and girls, to adults, to aunties to grandparents. It’s the darnedest thing, I’ll tell you what.
The rules are simple;
The originator of the dance is the person in the house.
They will play a song upon the arrival of friends or family.
They will then start dancing impromptu as soon as the door opens.
Those who enter and find the host dancing are obligated to dance with them as well.
The guests are not expected to remove their shoes when dancing.
If they are carrying something, they can put it down so that they can dance.
Yes, it is pretty crazy. Whether or not this fad will continue throughout the year, or will die this Chinese New Year is up to speculation. I guess that we will all just have to wait and see.
Partying with Friends
Of course, the entire week is filled with meals and parties. The Chinese really do love to party.
They drink (that grain alcohol), and wine… not to sip… but to quaff down in entire glass-fills. This is not only reserved for friends, but for co-workers, classmates, cousins, immediate family, extended family, and even the entire village (if you come from a smaller settlement).
I have videos and videos and videos of this. I have thousands of videos taken during the KTV, or adventures in the bars. I have videos at the BBQ pits that are everywhere, to the impromptu get togethers that seem to reflect what China is today.
Friends get together with friends. Girls go out with girls. Guys go out with guys. Brothers go out with brothers. Sisters go out with sisters. This is a time when everyone goes out to party with each other
Here are some general videos that seem to represent most of what is going on during this period of time.
Just some gals having fun with their friends. They could be co-workers or just friends. But, what does it matter, really? Life is too short to play the corporate “game’. Go out, go forth, and make friends. have a good time, and get drunk with your co-workers. Life is meant to be lived.
That’s some chicks in a bar. What about the guys? What if you are in the midst of building your life, and aren’t in a city bar? What can you do?
Heck you do what we used to do in Pennsylvania (and Florida, New York and California, and Michigan too). You get a keg of beer, and a bunch of food and have a BBQ outside, and crank the music up loud.
And yes, they have meals inside and outside. In fact, the Chinese love BBQ and many a great night can be spent drinking beer, chatting, dancing, and singing over BBQ…
Can you blame them?
You’ll also note that the Chinese will cook other things with the BBQ. Truthfully, the BBQ is anything cooked over flame. So, the Chinese will often cook such things as chicken, beef, pork, and mutton. In addition, they will cook such things as onions, lettuce, pepper (actually very good), toufu, and bread. They will cook things like fish, wrapped in aluminum foil, and even make up a batch of noodles.
The noodles are kind of rare, but, heck, if you want some spaghetti, well… go for it. All food is glorious. Don’t ya think?
Here’s a video of some guys at a KTV. What? They aren’t singing. Oh, I wonder why… Oh, look one of the guys just made a call and arranged for some pretty girls to join them for fun and frolic. Gosh, youse just got to love China!
Fireworks
Of course, everyone knows about the fireworks. We have fireworks in the United States. Ah… yeah, but the Chinese do it differently.
To them, the noise and the lights scare away evil spirits that retard growth, prosperity and wealth. The louder the fireworks, the noisier the fireworks, and the louder… the better. So when you see the fireworks in China, it is absolutely amazing. It completely dwarfs anything seen in the USA by a factory of a thousand.
Check this out. Isn’t it just amazing?
What is truly amazing is that these fireworks don’t last for 45 minutes or so. They last all night. They last for 12, and even 24 hours! Just like this. I well remember seeing the scene from my house in TangXia when the morning sun lifted and I could survey the city around me, that the fireworks and smoke still continued in all it’s crazy glory. It looks like the hills are all on fire. Seriously.
And good luck trying to get some sleep. LOL.
This is all over the world. Here is a very impressive display from a tiny, tiny village in the middle of the mountains. Pretty impressive eh? make the firework display in NYC look like a child’s toy.
To me, it all looks like a horrible weapons barrage that seems endless. What ever it might look like, I can tell you that any bad spirits would be too frightened by all the noise, the bright lights and explosions. For certain!
Family Meals
Many families eat outside in the restaurants, however many families have these huge spreads in the homes. Just like the United States, there are familial get together’s where all the kids get to play and the adults make the food, chat, play cards, and generally get shit-faced drunk.
Here is a typical middle-class family. Note that many families live in those large apartment buildings. The smaller homes are quite expensive and are worth many millions of dollars. The furniture is typical, as is the flooring and the walls. The Chinese do not like carpeting in the least. (It’s dirty.) They prefer white, gold and red colors, and while this household might look opulent to us Americans, know that it is pretty much typical for the middle class Chinese.
This video could have been taken anywhere in China. It could have been taken at my in-laws, or my friends house. It could have been taken in Shenzhen, Shanghai or Beijing. It’s very typical.
I actually pointed this out before to other Americans. They responded that that couldn’t possibly be the case. They argued that if this was true that we would see examples of Chinese houses in the American media…
Sure. Sure. Sure.
Hum. I guess they still believe in the Easter Bunny. You don’t argue with people who have closed minds and who’s reality was formed by the American media and their distortions, inaccuracies, and outright lies.
Here’s another typical Chinese house made up for the 2019 Chinese New Year holiday…
Parades
Of course, there are parades. Some have the famous dragon that can be seen in China-town in the States. But the Chinese parades tend to be quite different than the United States in ways difficult to describe…
Here we have a bunch of “monkey kings” dancing in the parade. This, in my mind, is pretty darn awesome, and you won’t find anything even approaching it in the States.
Some things are unique to China, and cannot be found anywhere else. Guys… different is good. You don’t want all the restaurants to look like McDonald’s. You don’t want all the coffee houses to look like Starbucks, and you don’t want every nation to have democrats like Ocasio-Cortez reforming everything to make it “better”.
Which is a great plus about China. They have declared war on SJW folk and take active steps to have them removed from society before they can tarnish and destroy time-honored traditions. Thank God for China and realizing that SJW moments harm the nation in numerous ways.
Anyways…
And here is another “parade” in a small village.
I really don’t have a word for what is going on here as this kind of thing is alien to the West. It certainly does not exist in America. It is where locals dress up like famous gods and heroes and go from house to house scaring away the bad spirits that might bring bad luck during the year.
Prayers to the Gods
One of the things that the Chinese do is light these mini candles that float up into the sky with the wishes and prayers of the sender. It’s actually a wonderful sight to behold, and many people take part in this ritual throughout the nation.
I read about this being tried in the United States. In fact, I read two stories about this, and the crazy reactions that resulted. The first story had the people doing this arrested for creating “UFO hoaxes”. The second story, also had people arrested, only this time it was because they did not have a permit to launch anything like this, and that it might disrupt the ability to fly.
Gosh darn it! Can’t Americans just be left alone?
Other Celebrations
Of course, the smaller communities in the rural areas would do what rural communities always did. They would host parties filled with song and dance (and free alcoholic beverages) for the towns people to enjoy. This was true in Europe and the United States, prior to all the new “progressive government” ushered in around 1913 or so…
If you don’t know what I am referring to, then I must humbly suggest that your knowledge of history is seriously in dire need of readjustment. I would suggest that you find some elderly people in your community and start talking with them. If you cannot, they find old issues of “The Good Old Days” magazine and read it.
All the progressive “improvements” such as banning alcohol, smoking, and making things “safer” did not exist until the 19th Amendment was passed. Those progressive assholes in the early 19th century really fucked everything up for the rest of us. They destroyed our Republic and gave us a Nanny-State. A land where everyone reports to “Big Momma”.
Sorry about that. I get sidetracked so easily.
Here we have some folk having fun, drink and song in a small village. Don’t they look like they are having fun? Don’t they look like they are having fun? Don’t they look like they are having a great time? Why can’t we have this in the Untied States?
Sorry, Dude… It’s because “of the children”…
And… in Tibet
For most Americans, we believe that Tibet is an annexed land that is under repression by the evil satanic communists. It must be set free!
Yah, maybe fifty years ago. Today, Tibet is wholly integrated into China. You could no more remove Tibet from China, as you could remove California, and Texas, and Nevada from the United States. Don’t believe me? Check out this map and see for yourself.
Here we can clearly see that the region of Tibet represents a significant portion of the landmass of China. It is bigger than both California and Texas combined together. yet, somehow, we Americans are told that we can “demand” China to offer autonomy to this region, in exchange for American “benefits”, what ever they might be.
Anyways, today, the population of Tibet is predominantly Han-Chinese. It’s pretty understandable, as the Chinese government gave incentives for the Chinese to relocate into Tibet. It’s sort of how the American democrats give free welfare to any illegal who enters the United States, as long as they will vote for democrats. Its the same thing.
Here we have a Chinese gal in Tibet celebrating the new year of the pig…
Aftermath
You’ll notice that many people talk with hoarse voices, as all the “white wine” pretty much tore holes in their throats. People gather their belongings, and start the trek back home. All the free drink, the free cigarettes, and all the food comes to an end. It’s a quiet calmness…
Conclusions
This was just a short and sweet posting of various videos taken in China during the CNY 2019 year of the pig. I know it’s not covered by the American media. The best that you can ever expect is a small blurb mentioning that new Chinese new year.
We interrupt our hate-fest against President Trump with some news from around the world. In China, they had a new year. Some fireworks were lit. Meanwhile Democrat XXXXXXX proposes some taxes to support the banning of YYYYYYY. It's for global warming, don't you know.
For most Americans, it is an interesting bit of trivia. Like how many buttons the average coat has, or the average size of a chicken egg. This is unfortunate, as the CNY holiday is much, much more than simply a “holiday”. It represents many things of significant value, and the fact that half the population of the world celebrates it should be reason for consideration.
I hope that I was able to present some new and interesting aspects of this holiday to the reader that is sorely lacking in the WELL (Super Well-Paid) “journalists” that work for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the LA Times and Salon… sigh. They are NOT doing their jobs.
Obviously one of two things must be true. Either [1] their job is no longer to inform, or [2] they are seriously incompetent, as are the complete editorial staff at the media headquarters.
>>This isn’t merely a question for Trump supporters, but for anyone who still thinks that a political system that isn’t completely run by thugs, with only a simulacrum of democracy as window dressing, is something worth trying to maintain and improve. <<
It is a fool’s errand to attempt to save the Union. The ideological gap between left and right is far to wide to ever bridge. They are polar opposites.
The best we can hope for is an amicable split. Fredrick Douglas wondered if the US is just to large an area to be governed by one central government in Washington. It is, a “one size fits all” system is not working
The sooner the majority of people in this country realize that and start the process of diving the nation in a peaceful manner, the better. Otherwise, we will continue our slow decent into hell.
There are many things that a person can do to improve themselves. In my case, I could lose some weight, and eat better. I could be kinder to people, and stop reading the news so much. I could spend more time with friends and family, and I could spend more time in nature. I think that if I did those things, I would be a better person.
It’s not just me. I look around the world and see all kinds of things that could be improved with a modest amount of effort. The key here is the word “modest”.
For instance, planting a tree in your yard. Exposing children to dogs and cats at an early age. Sweeping the sidewalk in front of your house, and having a small vegetable garden might be really nice if a decent percentage of people would spend the time and effort to force some change.
Now, well…
I look at all the things going on in the United States today, and everyone seems to agree on both sides of the political spectrum that things are “not well”.
There are many meme’s about the Obama apologies. Most of us Americans deeply resented Obama’s actions and behaviors.
The world is a steamy place, it seems. Radical communists have made their voices known and are taking off their masks and have complete control of the Democrat party, and many critical aspects of the United States government. They hold sway in key positions in every Federal and State organization, they have significant blocks of power in the Judicial branch, and they own all media, social media, and popular culture.
Conservatives, much like myself, really wish that we would be left alone and able to live our lives in peace. Seriously, we just want to be left alone.
Ah, such is our pipe dream.
Now, progressives are unhappy because they aren’t able to control everyone yet. They have entire wish lists of rules and laws that they want to implement to make America a “better” place. They will continue to be unhappy until people are on their knees bowing to them with arms outstretched. You know, like a scene out of ancient Egypt, or what it was like under Pol Pot or East Germany under the shadow of Communism.
American progressives want to take over America and implement an agenda very similar to what Pol Pot tried to do in Cambodia. – Ethnic cleansing. – To regain the glory of the Angkor Empire. – To reclaim Kampuchea Krom. – To get all CIA and KGB agents out of Democratic Kampuchea.
They just are beside themselves waiting for that day when you will be on your knees in supplication to them, and they will stand up in the mantles of wealth and glory.
So really, neither side is happy.
As such, here are some ideas that I have in an effort to recapture the spirit of what America used to be for my grandparents and my parents; “The Land of the Free”. It was a time when you could be yourself, say what you wanted, and you could even smoke in your office at work. Imagine that!
Unfortunately, too many of these young people are also upset about ridiculous things. They are part of a hypersensitive, hyper-politically correct group known as ‘Social Justice Warriors.’ A few years ago when I first heard the term ‘Social Justice Warrior,’ I wasn’t sure what it meant. I thought SJWs were doing some kind of noble, laudable work. I pictured them as volunteers at food banks. Maybe they were trying to help senior citizens get the prescription medicine they couldn’t afford. I pictured them trying to help the downtrodden in society. Instead, SJWs epitomize political correctness gone amuck. They are incredibly thin-skinned. They browbeat and scold others into giving up freedom of speech or expression. Want to wear a Halloween costume? You’d better check with the campus commissar of political correctness first. (Yes, the protesters want some sort of official on campus who will determine what can and cannot be said or done).
It was a time when being an American meant something truly great, and everyone referred to “their freedom”. It was a time when our president didn’t apologize for anything, and you were free to eat sunny-side-up eggs and get a five cent cup of coffee. All without some hugely fat, pink and green haired, monster of a woman (?) having something to say about it.
Freedom! Man, that’s what it’s all about!
Firstly [1], reduce the number of laws.
I know that this will upset the progressive liberals in the audience, but it is true. America has too many laws. They are too complex, and in a tiered layer structure from federal, state, county and local levels. They are supported by an army of attorneys, and law clerks. This has made life difficult for those of us who have to live under the laws.
Indeed, America has the highest number of laws in the world.
More laws = more restrictions and controls = LESS freedom.
Of course, many of the laws are just ignored. Most Americans just let the laws roll off our shoulders, and we shrug it off. But, an evil person; a progressive can use those laws and club us over the head with them. For the laws are so enormous and so numerous that everyone and anyone can get arrested, all you need to do is get on the “bad side” of someone.
It is illegal for bar owners to sell beer unless they are simultaneously brewing a kettle of soup.
When having sex, only the missionary position is legal.
It is illegal to skateboard without a license.
It is illegal to lie down and fall asleep with your shoes on.
It’s a very simple logic.
As such, everything is over-regulated in America. Too much regulation takes away freedoms. In fact, if I were to be so bold, I contend that a law, no matter how well intentioned, is an affront to freedom. Thus, in a truly “free” nation, you would have the smallest number of laws necessary.
These laws have but one purpose.
They do things that would cause Americans to be fined, investigated, arrested and imprisoned for. This is true everywhere. Elsewhere in the world you can do so many things that Americans simply cannot. It is true. From buying Viagra without a prescription in Mexico to shopping with your dog in a grocery store in China. America has way too many laws and restrictions on freedom.
Now, I know some of the laws are supposed to be there to protect people, but they’ve gone way into overkill. Other countries are able to maintain safety without so many laws. So why can’t the US?
Come on!
Do we really… really need warning stickers on ladders to warn us about falling off? Do we really, and I mean it, really need to ban large sodas, sunny-side up eggs, or paper bags? Are Americas so friggin’ stupid (like our elected officials apparently believe) that we MUST be told how to behave, for our own good?
Really?
And what is all this nonsense about banning straws? Why not something useful, like banning potholes? Or, banning dog-shit on pizza? There has to be limits. There has to be guidelines, periodic audits and purging of antiquated, erroneous or outdated laws. Too much over-control is not a good thing.
You know it, and I know it.
There are reasons for all this control. Whether it is overt, or surreptitious, these laws are for control. Control over YOUR actions.
Of course, you can strip away the reasoning, the narrative, and the bullshit and get to the real root of the matter. The fact is, that many laws are there just to tax people and allow government to stick its nose where it doesn’t belong. Such, as I might dare say, such as in the affairs of private families and businesses.
Moreover, too much government control or state planning has never been good for economic growth, as history has shown. Don’t believe me? Check this link out…
In any event, there needs to be a serious overhaul of the legal system in the Untied States and a great reduction in the overall quantity and extent of the laws present.
I would suggest, and it is only my modest suggestion, to eliminate one law every second. That way, in about 200 years, there might be only the bare minimum laws on the books.
Secondly, [2] Pare down the size of government.
As if the first point wasn’t upsetting to the progressive liberals, asking them to reduce the size of the government is tantamount to asking them for voluntary castration. Taking money from a liberal is sacrilege. They clutch it in their greedy little hands and just won’t let go. Aiii!
The size of the US government has increased in size many, many times since the dawn of the 20th Century. The size of the government has grown like a huge monster out of control.
Ah, but unfortunately, governments don’t like to decrease in size because politicians don’t want to lose money. They’ve got their grubby little hands in the pots, and with America… that’s many, many pots. That’s many, many hands, and like fat pigs, everyone and everything is at the trough eating away.
Hey! How’s that $7,000,000,000,000 that Obama gave to South Africa helping you out personally? What about your friends? Or, how is it helping fill those potholes in the streets?
That’s why the founding fathers of America emphasized that government should be small and limited with minimal powers. And why, it was set up as a Republic where the only people that would be elected were our Congressmen.
The United States today does not look anything like what it was initially constructed as. In fact, it is the exact opposite.
The ideal size of government was the way it was during the 1800’s, when the US government was a small size and did not bother people much.
It had a very Laissez Faire type of approach, which allowed people a lot more freedoms and economic growth.
With small government came little need for taxes. Thus there was no income tax and no inflation. In fact, the value of the dollar remained stable throughout the 1800’s and by the end of the century actually had risen in value, thus technically resulting in deflation.
The size of the United States government has gotten so enormous and unwieldy that it is called “the swamp”. It is a mess of complexity where people who have been getting rich and comfortable living off it it, do everything they can to maintain the status quo.
Contrary to the narrative of “we need taxes for the roads and the bridges”, we had roads, bridges, a military and everything else long before we ever passed the federal income tax and the Federal Reserve. America got by just fine.
Anyone who uses that specious, and really over-worn argument, has the brain of a snail, and the memory of a tape worm. The issue is not, nor ever was, the collection of taxes. It has always been about how revenue was collected, and who paid for it.
Now that was the kind of government that Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers had in mind, which was nothing like the huge Orwellian type of government that we have today. Oh, and speaking about Orwell and his prophesies…
Big brother and the NSA observe and record everything that you do. It is all housed in Utah.
[3] Cut away the regulation, and fees that seem to be on everything.
Again, the progressives just love to regulate and control everything. They are control freaks. As such, the amount of regulation in the United States is insane. Seriously it is insane.
Oh, did I say that it is insane? Well, just in case I didn’t make myself clear on this matter; it is insane.
When Trump came to office, one of the first things that he tried to do was reduce the amount of regulation in the government. This caused eruptions of anger, laughter and disgust from the progressive liberal media.
The US has one of the highest costs of living in the world. You can blame inflation. You can blame innovation. You can blame crime. You can blame just about everything for this, but no one wants to blame the true root cause; rules and regulation.
Why is everything so darn expensive? Rules and regulation.
Each and every time that you add a regulation to something, you add a cost. Let’s suppose you want to make sure that hamburger buns don’t have green mold growing on it, so you write a regulation. Well, someone needs to inspect to make sure of compliance. Someone needs to be trained to inspect, and there needs to be a system of training, and monitoring the workers who do the inspections. All this costs MONEY. Someone has to pay, and that person is often YOU.
The rising costs of medical care in the United States is directly proportional to the size of paper-pushers that are used to service it. As the medical industry started to become regulated, the costs rose skyward into the stratosphere. You, when you pay a hospital bill, are not paying for the doctors services, you are actually mostly paying for the people in government to file and approve your forms.
In my dreams, I fantasize about every receipt having all the taxes and fees that went into the purchase listed and easy to read. That receipt would be a yard long, I’ll tell you what.
Here is the streamlined version of the Obama / Hillary Clinton healthcare plan known as the ACA. Each bubble represents a COST that YOU need to pay.
Compared to the other 200 countries, the US is definitely in the top tier when it comes to expensive costs of living. Prices and costs are way too high and so is inflation.
In the 20th century, the US dollar lost 95 percent of its value. In contrast, during the 1800’s there was no inflation and the dollar was worth more at the end of the 1800’s than at the beginning.
The value of the dollar has absolutely plummeted since the Federal Reserve was created. This means that the people who use this medium of exchange is forced to hold on to worthless scraps of paper. When I was born, my mother saved up for months to get me a $100 savings bond. When she died, and I inherited it, I discovered that I couldn’t even buy a decent meal with it. What was once worth a few months salary fell below the value of a meal.
Higher cost of living means that one has to work more and be a slave to their job more, with LESS free time to do what they want.
There’s not even time for personal growth.
What’s the point of living when all you do is work to make a living? What’s there to live for? It’s pointless. You are just a slave hamster on a treadmill. Being a debt slave is not living freely.
Why are you in your career? What does all the work buy for you and your children? Is the stress and worry worth it? Personal satisfaction comes from control of your finances.
As we all know, money can buy freedom, if one has enough of it. Thus, a higher cost of living means that people have LESS capability to “buy their freedom” since their money is worth less.
This insane rising cost of living in the US is most likely deliberately planned. Here’s why: The US is known to have the biggest gap between rich and poor. So it is in the interest of the wealthy elite class to keep the poor in America poor. There are numerous reasons for this. You can parse the reasons, but it’s really just human nature. The rich want to stay that way, so they support policies that benefit the status quo.
This inhibits the “freedom” of upward mobility in America.
The progressive liberals claim to want everyone to be equal. In fact, they want to be the wealthy elite with everyone obeying them. Conservatives tend to want to be left alone, as long as they are happy, they have no problem with others being wealthier then they are. Unfortunately, the income so disproportionately favors the wealthy in the USA, that it has become impossible for most people to have any kind of comfortable life.
This would also explain the deliberate dumbing down of America in the public education system, which insider whistle-blowers such as Charlotte Iserbyt have revealed.
So you see, even what freedoms you have in America are being slowly undermined behind the scenes, without the public’s knowledge or approval.
[4] Prison function should be redirected to reduce crime not be profit centers.
America has the largest prison population in the world. Currently, there are 2 million people incarcerated in American prisons. 2 million! That’s crazy.
That’s crazy!
For all sorts of reasons, mostly an overuse of laws, has turned the United States into one big prison. Here, just about everyone knows someone who has been in jail or prison. It is the same sort of situation that was present in the former Soviet Union. This is a truly worrisome condition.
No other country has anywhere near that amount in prison.
Does that really mean that Americans are the most evil and dangerous people on the planet? It must, you know, if every other nation uses the same measures of what constitute a crime is.
Does that mean that our police force(s) are the most efficient in catching criminals? It must, you now, if every other nation uses the same measures of policing and population control.
Or, is it instead structured so that our society is one where everyone is a potential criminal…?
The United States incarcerates Americans at an alarming rate. Further, once incarcerated, under the 16th amendment, they lose their Freedoms guaranteed under the Bill of Rights. They are thus able to be treated differently… as a second tier or second class citizen or slave.
Only in a dysfunctional, insane, crazy, toxic, repressed society would that many people be in prison.
How can the alleged “freest country in the world” also have the biggest prison population as well?! That’s a huge oxymoron that doesn’t make sense! Obviously there is a chasm of difference between what America says and what it is.
America does not treat people equally under the eyes of justice. Instead they use laws to force compliance to arcane rules and provide “safe havens” for the wealthy, while the rest of America suffers.
[5] PC culture needs to be stop being promoted by the media.
As if that is ever gonna happen…
US social culture is way too politically correct, which greatly reduces your ability to speak freely and honestly. It’s a restriction on free speech. From what I know back in the 1970’s, there was no political correctness. I would go to work and people would tell me what they thought of me to my face directly. People were free to be as honest as they wanted, so they could speak their mind freely and from the heart.
If a guy was fat, you told him to his face that he was fat. If a woman was a bitch, you called her out as a bitch or a shrill. Freedom, real freedom, is the ability to speak your mind without consequence.
Even if someone has something negative to say, honesty is always better than suppression and repression.
The HR departments tend to be populated by social justice activists and politically correct types. Their job is to make sure employees fall in line. This is achieved by fear. Companies will not tolerate racist, sexist, or otherwise intolerant behavior. Anyone caught telling an off-color joke by the water cooler could be fired. A male employee who compliments a female employee on her appearance could find himself in big trouble.
To prevent such trouble, the HR departments train employees on proper etiquette, behavior, and other matters that’s really nothing more than common sense. Employees get lectured about the company’s desire for a healthy, productive work environment with a welcoming atmosphere. The two words most favored by corporate HR departments are ‘diversity,’ and ‘inclusion.’ These words are used with a fervent religiosity. People ‘of color,’ ‘the LGBQT community, the disabled and so forth are to be treated with exceptional tolerance and kindness.
White males? Not so much, because they are usually seen as potential transgressors of company policy.
With this in mind, America has become a lot LESS free since the 70’s in terms of free speech and freedom to be yourself. In other countries where there is less political correctness, one feels a lot freer. It is refreshing, and really underlines this PC nonsense as a serious issue that must be addressed.
The overbearing political correctness in modern America, coupled with the media driving high levels of fear and paranoia in people, makes America a very socially unhealthy place to live. It is repressing individuality, our shared and unique cultures and people. I want my America back.
It is unhealthy to be called “deplorable”, “toxic” and a “Nazi”. It is unhealthy to treat being male and acting as a man an illness, while glorifying gay people and transgenders. It is a sign of a very, very sick nation.
We don’t see how sick the United States is today, because most of us are sitting right down smack down in the middle of it. We need to go elsewhere to see how people live their lives, and then we can make comparisons. When you make those comparisons, you can see the sickness in all it’s festering nastiness.
So know that political correctness is not there to help protect people. It has a purpose. It’s an evil and dangerous purpose. For it is a first stage in controlling the masses.
You see, once you restrict free speech in the name of “cultural sensitivity”, it then becomes easier to take away other freedoms and put in more control.
To take away freedom, you do it in small steps, so that each subsequent step becomes easier for people to take. That’s how the ruling elite impose their will when its unpopular, by doing it gradually in increments. They’ve always done it this way.
Go ahead, all these laws, rules, regulations and political correctness is all about changing you to a point where you will accept socialism. Then under that environment, you can be stripped of your freedoms; your liberties, and forced to slave away for others as they determine.
[6] All social engineering efforts must be curtailed and scaled back.
Compared to what it was like when I grew up, today’s American social culture is fake, artificial, phony and toxic.
Yes, being told that boys must act like girls in order to be masculine is FAKE. It is artificial, and it is toxic. There is simply no other way to say it.
Today our youth are not allowed to be their true self. Boys are not permitted to act like boys. Girls are not so severely restricted, but even then, they are being instructed in alternative gender roles. These teachings are harmful. For the children must act and fit within (modern progressive) “acceptable” modes of behavior.
In a way, it is normal for children to find out what their identities are. Starting from high school, teenagers learn to act very phony and artificial, like posers. They have to do so in order to be cool and have friends. Otherwise, they will become misfits and social outcasts.
The problem comes when powerful interests devote money, resources and time to direct them towards other objectives. In effect outlawing tradition in favor of a new future. One where all men act and behave like like girls. It is not healthy.
The divide between the left and right is widening in America. Instead of rational debate, we’re seeing more vitriol and trench digging. The mainstream media and the left want President Trump impeached. Their bogus ‘Russia’ narrative has unravelled, so now they’re calling Trump’s supporters ‘Nazis’ or ‘white supremacists.’
If you are authentic and down-to-earth, you will be seen as introverted and lacking in social skills, when in reality, you just don’t like acting fake and artificial. It’s very upside down.
Our world teaches kids to “be yourself,” but that rule often applies to everyone but the “traditional” male. The APA has declared “traditional masculinity” to be harmful. They’re wrong: https://t.co/FMNgXUy20s
This is how the typical American fake personality forms. Children are born with genuine personalities. But beginning in high school, they are gradually molded into the fake social persona that is required to fit into American social culture. This carries on into adulthood.
Trigglypuff. Dr Hoff-Sommers was appearing at the University of Massachusetts at Amhurst along with the comedian and radio broadcaster Mr Stephen Crowder and the Tech editor of Brietbart Mr Milo Yiannopolous. Milo made his usual spiel about ‘feminism being a cancer’, and the hall erupted. Next to take the stage was Dr Hoff-Sommers who said that ‘feminism was not a cancer but campus feminism was madness’. This reasonable observation of the far left feminist/gender studies/queer studies scene on American campuses was also met by howling and screaming from the audience. I fear that many of the audience of Leftists there would not recognize the right to free speech if it jumped up and slapped them round the face. There was one particular protester there whose behavior was so bad, so outrageous and so much more like that of a toddler than a grown woman that film of her flailing her arms about rapidly went viral. Trigglypuff.
Only older folks and senior citizens can afford to be down-to-earth again, because at their age, they no longer are trying to conform or fit in. Plus the seniors of today come from a generation when Americans were more down-to-earth than today.
The social culture is also very toxic in that it undermines your self-esteem. It is toxic because it tries to tear you down, making you feel insecure and inadequate. Today, no one feels accepted for themselves in America. They always feel like they aren’t good enough and have to prove themselves.
We do our sons no favors when we tell them that they don’t have to answer that voice inside them that tells them to be strong, to be brave, and to lead. We do them no favors when we let them abandon the quest to become a grown man when that quest gets hard https://t.co/FMNgXUy20s
The consequence of this is that when you develop a fake artificial social personality in America in order to fit in and be accepted. It is not at all healthy. It separates you from your true authentic self, which becomes suppressed in the process. Our youth starts to take on adaptive behaviors that are not healthy.
I do not care what CNN or WaPo or the Huffington Post thinks, this unhealthy behavior is not good for men.
The new America man as formed by American media and the PC sensitivities of the feminist movement and high-paid diversity officers in workplaces. They are known as caring beta-chucks or metrosexuals.
As a result of this psychological schism between your fake social self and your true authentic self, you experience a deep inner fragmentation, which in turn leads to mental imbalance and inner conflict. There is nothing healthy with gender-confused children.
This, I believe, is the primary cause of many forms of mental disorders in America. And it’s why you see so many crazy messed up people in America, and depressed degenerates everywhere (especially in urban areas).
Note that puberty suppression therapy through hormone intervention is increasingly being recommended for children with gender dysphoria and at younger ages, yet there is little evidence that shows that puberty suppression is “reversible, safe, or effective for treating gender dysphoria.”
In addition, Americans are raised to believe in many contradictory things, which screws them up psychologically. (As if gender confusion wasn’t bad enough.)
For example, Americans are taught that they are “free individuals in a free country”. Good right? However, Americans are also taught that they must conform to society and adopt all its strict rules, laws and boundaries. The two things are contradictory.
Freedom is the ability to have free exercise of thoughts and actions.
Liberty is the ability to practice freedom.
And at work, they are required to conform to their work culture and become subservient slaves to their jobs.
Shame on the @APA. As a psychologist, masculinity and femininity in their mature forms are inherently virtuous. “The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful.”
All of this takes a toll on the hapless America (male) who hasn’t any decent role models outside of a fictional narrative to guide him. Instead he is presented with rules and codes of behavior that run against his biological and genetic programming. This is NOT healthy.
The new modern man as promoted by the mainstream media.
To give another example: Many Americans are raised with good Christian values but then in the adult world, they are taught that “profit is king” and that “greed is good”. Like two muscles that become damaged when they rub against each other, their minds become damaged by such conflicting beliefs.
They become like the Clintons who attend church. There is no way that this can be considered healthy.
Clinton at church. I wonder what it will be like for her when she enters Heaven. What do you think, dear reader? To me, it looks like the devil visited the church and is lecturing the people that if they give her more money she will guarantee them a seat in Heaven.
Anyway, the reason why this makes American unfree is this: If you have to develop an artificial phony social personality to conform to American social culture, then you are disallowed from expressing your true authentic self. In other words, you are not allowed to be yourself in America, at least not your real genuine self.
You see, being free to “be yourself” is the true definition of freedom, while having to be something you’re not is a psychological prison. Thus America, under PC rules of behavior, takes away your freedom to be yourself, which is the highest expression of freedom.
You’re not even allowed to flirt in America anymore.
Flirtation is seen as creepy, inappropriate and taboo in modern America. However, flirtation was normal, cool and acceptable in America prior to the mid 1980’s. (and in most foreign countries today, it still is) But after that, it somehow became a bad creepy thing.
People who grew up during the 70’s and 80’s know this, but no one dares to talk about this or has an explanation for why that is. In modern America, you are not even supposed to have desires to flirt. If you do, you are considered a creep, a pervert and a bad person.
The new socially acceptable American woman. You must cover your body and that gives you freedom!
Perhaps that’s why no one dares to talk about it. It’s a taboo. This is way too uptight, unnatural and no fun.
[7] Severely reduce fear-mongering and the severe neocon influence.
The social vibe in America is permeated with high levels of fear and paranoia. It really is. There is no denying it. You cannot visit a single media site without being confronted by this. Whether it is killer hornets in China, or armed illegals crossing the border, or the dangers of terror in West-boom-boom-askan, it is everywhere.
Dudes, in case you are unaware, war is terrible. It really it. It is horrible.
Any war with a serious and large nation like China or Russia will not be like you expect. It will not be televised on the nightly news, where you can watch it over your TV-dinner after work. You won’t be logging into the internet to see what is going on in the world. Listen up!
A war with China or Russia will be personal.
You will be lucky to have electricity, let alone internet access. You will be busy checking your stockpiles of iodine to keep the radiation poisoning to a bare minimum, and you will do your best to burn the blankets that your loved ones died in. After all, getting smallpox or the bubonic plague is not something to take lightly.
It will be a harsh reality where you might have to kill your beloved dog for food. It will be a reality where even taking a shower might be risky and threaten your very life.It will be frustrating, because there will be little that you can do. You won't know what is going on in the world, but you will know that your little piece of life in the USA will have been altered terribly.
LISTEN TO ME.
This is not going to be a scene from the walking dead where you and your friends get to fight zombies over the tattered remains of what was once a town. No, you will be dying from a sickness that you don't have any idea to cure, while you huddle in a burnt out and darkened cinder block room while drones, you won't know if friendly or not, will scan the skies above.
The neocons have no idea what they are playing around with.
The neocons in government, along with their friends in the mainstream media want war. They want to keep Americans living in fear. But this fear mongering is not sustainable. Sooner or later, the costs will become far too great. The risk of WMD events in the United States will become too alarming. This all must stop.
All this war-mongering is unhealthy. It creates segregation between people, and making the country socially unfree.
Remember, boys and girls, both World War I and World War II each were over within five years. The idea of long, on-going military operations didn't come into being until after the Korean War. Since then, most wars that the United States has been involved in can best be described as "forever wars".
This neocon influence is not only about wars and military. When coupled with the PC progressive narrative and the army of social justice warriors that occupy our urban areas it combines to a toxic environment.
This is further exasperated when you throw in social media and the internet.
The American political spectrum graphed for easy readability and comparison. Of course, the progressives consider Trump to be a neoconservative and fascist, yet his policies and actions do not reflect their narrative. His actions reflect a more libertarian approach to governance. Based on actions and policies.
America also feels very socially unfree in that there is this high level of fear and paranoia between people, even between neighbors, which creates social separation. You ask, “Hey! is that person an Arab and is he gonna scream “praise Allah” while he runs over my children?”.
You wonder if you should tell the girl in the office if she looks good in her dress, lest someone overhears and you lose your job for sexual harassment. (Which reminds me of the reason why the movie “God Bless America” came into being…)
God Bless America meme.
You can feel it in the social vibe and energy of most places, which does not feel positive at all. There is this unnatural fear of strangers, and this ice wall between strangers.
Maybe it manifests by being yelled at by trolls on social media. Maybe it’s simply because the NSA is spying on everyone, or that all your location data (whether you know about it being collected or not) is being sold to anyone with a spare $20 to spend.
Or, maybe it’s because the social media, and the mainstream media routinely makes fun of you or people that you care about and love.
Whatever the reason, there is a kind of coldness in the United States today that wasn’t there a few decades ago.
America is no longer a place where you can be truly free. It is a place where you are observed and judged. It is a place where you behaviors are policed and if you do not conform, you risk losing everything through incarceration.
All of this manifests in a kind of distrust to people who you do not know. While sure, you smile at others on the street, or shake the hands of people in church, you tend to back away from getting too close.
You know, there are some really, really strange people “out there”. You don’t want to have your child kidnapped, or have someone break into your car for some meth. You have to be careful.
Hey! Does that Antifa logo look familiar? Well, it should. It was the logo of the Communists who worked to bring Hitler to power. Then, once Hitler came to power, he set his Nazi goons after Antifa. Thus making them forever hate the Nazi’s that bested them. The progressive liberals wants a repeat of this.
Because of all of this, people seem cold and distant.
Out in public, people don’t talk to strangers unless it’s business-related. Communication is strictly for business only. There is no feeling of social or human connection at all. And no camaraderie between people. Instead, the atmosphere is one of cold isolation, which easily leads to loneliness.
People start to put on a cold and aloof face when ever they are threatened or whenever they are afraid of being themselves. This fear of not showing who you really are manifests in other things, most of which results in a cold exterior and attitude.
The lack of freedom to speak your mind results in a cold exterior. You develop this out of necessity. It is like the child that is bullied in school who develops odd behaviors to fit in or avoid being hurt.
The thing is, humans are not meant to be solitary creatures.
We are meant to be interdependent, have friendships and social connection with others. It is an integral part of our happiness. Yet this is greatly inhibited in America, as explained above. And America falsely teaches that one should not need others, but be independent from others.
Needless to say, trying to make friends in America is one of the hardest things.
People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. The reason for the world being in chaos is that things are being loved and that people are being used.
What this means is that America has become very socially unfree in that you do not have the freedom to socially connect with others.
[8] Tone down social media…
Well…duh…
People in modern America seem repressed, robotic and zombie-like, it is like they have no soul and are not alive. Perhaps this is why zombie movies and video games are so popular nowadays.
Americans have gotten into the habit of turning towards the internet for answers to things, friendships, creativity and a sense of belonging. We have turned to things, instead of turning to people.
That is unhealthy.
Today, people devote hours to their computer or social media on their smart phone. Really, is all the :likes” on Facebook going to improve your life? We need to seek genuine acceptance with flesh and blood people what share our interests and values.
You don’t connect to ideas. You connect with people. You don’t feel belonging as a number, you belong when you have friends who call you by your name. We really need to step away from the computers and reconnect to others in real life in real time.
And hey! if you cannot connect with other people, then try animals. Dogs and cats make great companions. Please connect with something that is ALIVE.
Live your life with others. Share your passions, your experiences and who you are. Do not lock yourself in a tiny room in front of a flickering screen late at night.
You know, it wasn’t like that long ago though.
Americans were more human and natural in the past. Heck, I grew up in the 1960’s and 1970’s. This is a fact, Jack. With each decade, Americans gradually became cold, soulless, guarded, unfriendly, unsocial, hateful, jeering, spoiled, standoffish, cynical, snobby, and began to dislike others.
I blame the Clintons, and their RINO friends.
All of a sudden there was no longer a sense of closeness between family and friends. It was like a “wave of energy” swooped across the nation and changed people.
Ok, maybe I’m a little too harsh on the Clinton crime syndicate. You really need to look at all the trends and the root behaviors of huge swaths of people. Don’t know what I am talking about? Maybe these two links will give you some insight…
Thus, I blame many things for this.
Maybe it’s the trend to put pineapple of pizza. Or, maybe it is when the government tried to ban Tab. Maybe it was when McDonald’s was forced to remove their little aluminum foil ashtrays. Maybe it was when all of the media was bought up by a mere five people, and yet still not considered a monopoly. Maybe it was when NASA was re-purposed away from space exploration to Muslim outreach.
Ah, there are so many things that can be the root cause…
Though I will have to lay corporate and political greed, the rash of MBA types being graduated out of universities and social engineering merged with technology to be some of the major vectors. The reasons are complex and numerous. The puzzle is a large one, with many, many pieces.
The influences on American life are many and complicated. There is no way that they can be distilled into something simple. However, with this under consideration, the reader should look at their own individual life and ask the difficult questions. Is life meaningful? Is is stress free? Are there things beyond your control, and or fears that are concerning? What are the solutions to reduce all this anxiety?
I guess that if there is one thing that I could positively say, is that the government and in the people in government stopped doing their jobs a long, long time ago. Instead they became focused in their own personal attainment of wealth.
The science fiction movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” in 1978, where people were replaced by alien clones with no feeling or emotion, seems to have already happened in America. Perhaps that film was a foreshadowing, either deliberately or as a message from higher forces above.
Of course, if you are a cold, unfeeling, soulless person yourself, you may not see anything wrong with this nor will you suffer from it. It’s only when you are soulful, passionate, romantic and full of feeling (like I am) that you suffer and feel out of place by this.
We are human. We need to feel connected with others. We should turn off the electronic media. Instead of texting, talk in person. Instead of playing a game on the PC, go out to the park, bring some food and have an outing. We need to connect with others.
The good news is that you can still find people who are open, social, expressive, passionate and uninhibited today. If you look carefully you can find them. you do not need to travel overseas to find them either. They are right there, right under your nose.
We need to start TRYING to connect with others. We need to start doing it TODAY…RIGHT NOW.
They might be the gal having a caramel latte at Starbucks, or the guy putting gas in his SUV at the gas station. It might be the family taking their pet to the vet, or the old man shopping alone in the grocery store. You just need to go out, smile and make friends. Oh, yeah, one more thing that you gotta do…
Turn off your computer.
Conclusion
There are many things wrong with the Untied States today. There really is very little that we can do about it on a personal level. We can either accept it, or leave.
I like to think that America is a very resilient nation. I think that the people can adapt and change and restructure things towards a climate of prosperity and growth. With this in mind, perhaps if there was a sizable decrease in the number of laws and regulations, it would free up people…
Perhaps if we stopped our love affair with the internet and social media and started to connect with people, animals and families that we would be happier and healthier. Seriously, we NEED each other.
Take your dog for a walk, or better yet, a spin on the bike.
Finally, those evil and corrupt tyrants that are trying to box Americans into new construct involving political correctness and massive blatant crimes need to be reigned in. They need to be stopped.
This is not a complete list. Heck, I didn’t even touch upon taxes. I didn’t even mention many of the things that are seriously wrong with the Untied States today. I only offered a handful of things that would go a long way towards resetting America back on track.
It is a track that puts people first, and money second. It is a track that places an importance on traditional families, marriage, children and education. It is a track where we have roles within our communities and all work together for the better good.
It is a track where people can be the best of who they are. Where the government is small and stands out of the way of people’s freedom. A track where America implements what China does when it comes to social Justice Warriors… they isolate them, and keep them safe and far, far away from society. Lest they do irreparable damage to society.
Read about the Chinese solution here…
Finally, spend time with your loved ones. This can be your friends or family or pets. Just spend the time. You won’t regret it. Trust me.
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this
post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss
growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with
the society within communist China. As there are some really stark
differences between the two.
More Posts about Life
I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified
about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that
are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a
personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome
to come and enjoy a read or two as well.
I am a big believer that men and women are different, and that the best way to maintain a strong family is to recognize these differences, embrace them and use them to our advantage. Of course, this is a traditional way of running a family household. It has worked for thousands of years. Today, I would like to concentrate on one of the fundamental elements of this traditional family setup; the Woman’s very-own Personal Vanity Space.
Men need their own spaces, of course. In Pittsburgh, the men would be given the basement, the garage, and the lower levels of a house. (Complete with a commode in the middle of the basement.) The women would get the largest bathroom in the house, and it would be “hers”. It was off limits to everyone else.
However, the need to use a bathroom as a personal vanity space was out of necessity. The ideal, of course, would be to have a separate room or area consisting of a vanity with large mirrors, great lighting and easy access to clothing. Here we talk about the specific design attributes for a vanity devoted to making a woman beautiful.
The Vanity
The most important element of this “personal space” is the vanity. This is a large specific piece of furniture that has only one purpose; for the woman of the house to preen herself and to make herself beautiful. This is because, in a traditional family, the way a woman takes care of herself is a direct reflection of how well the family is taken cared for.
It is important for a woman to take care of herself, in health, in emotion, in behaviors and in beauty.
Here is a vanity found in a locked up “time capsule” in Paris when the 91 year old owner died. This vanity has all the elements that will be discussed herein.
The Mirror
Make no mistake. The most important aspect of the vanity is the mirror. In general, the bigger the mirror, the better. In the above picture, we see a moderate sized mirror that is wider along the horizontal axis. This shows the great consideration to the importance of a mirror.
The need for a large mirror is so that the woman can see herself as she would look within a larger setting.
That is true. During the preening and makeup process, the woman will spend hours getting ready and looking beautiful. She will look at every facial imperfection, but in the end, the real issue is how she will look when it is all finished. That is the purpose of the vanity mirror.
Note that this main mirror is NOT the primary mirror. The vanity should have a smaller mirror, often with good lighting so that the woman can spend time working on the details of applying the makeup. There are all sorts of smaller makeup mirrors that serve this purpose. Some have built-in lights. While others have an enlargement mirror that enables really closeup views of the face.
This vanity is referred to as a “waterfall vanity” from the 1920’s. Note the generous size of the mirror. The larger mirror allows the woman to see herself in “the larger picture”. It is, perhaps, the most important attribute of a vanity.
The best vanity mirrors, in my mind are 1.5 yards in diameter. (Roughly four feet.) If you have the room, an enormous mirror of two yards in diameter would be excellent. Though, often this is not possible simply because of the constraints of the room.
What ever you do, you want to avoid the vanity table that only has a singular small mirror. That is good for closeup and facial preening, but it is totally useless for the final and overall finished effect. If you have a smaller vanity table, then you will need to supplement it with a standing full-length mirror…
Here is another vanity with a nice round mirror. It is not as fancy as the others, and very plain. Never the less, it has a space for shoes, five drawers and the ability for the woman to preen herself in all her glory.
But, the standing full-length mirror is a poor substitute. A woman needs to see HOW SHE LOOKS IN A ROOM.
A full-length mirror only shows the woman how she looks. She can see if her shoes match her outfit, or how her hair looks, or whether or not her outfit matches. The best mirror for a woman is a mirror that takes it all in. The woman can see how she looks in totality.
The Table Surface
The vanity needs to have a wide table top. Here the woman can place her beauty equipment, her masks, her facial cremes, her blushes, her eyeliners and her brushes in easy reach. The ideal vanity would be wide, but not so deep. Everything on the top surface would be easy to reach and would not fall off the side.
Here is a three mirror vanity. Usually three mirror vanities have mirrors that can be placed at angles so the woman can see how she looks at different points of view. Personally, I don’t care for them, but they do exist, and there are many women who love these types of vanities.
Some surfaces have a nice wood finish, while others might have a velvet top or nice mat. It all depends on the person who is using the vanity. Usually, it should be big enough for some small pictures in frames of loved ones, children or pets.
Drawers and Storage
There should be one lockable drawer. The rest can be regular drawers to contain other elements that the woman might want to store. I say that the drawer should be lockable simply because everyone should be afforded privacy.
Sure, any police or criminal can easily break into the drawer, but the purpose of the lock is to prevent children from getting into personal belongings, a nosy neighbor who suddenly “needs to use your bathroom”, or inquisitive kids.
Remember, having privacy does not mean that someone has things to hide. It simply means that we are permitted our own space to do with it as we may without consideration from others.
Here is another beautiful vanity. I love the woodwork, the clock and the enormous mirror. This is what a vanity is all about. Notice the center table surface. It is lower than the sides. Any bottles, or pictures placed there would not obstruct the mirror. Also take note of the space under the vanity to place ones’ feet. This is an absolutely beautiful vanity.
Under Storage
Underneath the vanity should be enough area for the woman to put her feet. Also, to kick off some shoes or other items so that they are comfortably placed.
Some women like to have a pillow under the vanity so that they could rest their feet on the pillow when they put the makeup on. Such as in the 70 year old vanity picture above.
The vanity is a womans’ space. It is designed solely for the comfort of a woman using it. When a woman is “getting ready” in front of the vanity, she should be relaxed and comfortable.
The Chair
The chair should be so that it is light with a very shallow or low back. The seat must be cushioned, and adornment is fine as long as it is tastefully done. In general, the woman should have a chair that matches the vanity. It should be easy to move around and match the overall tastes and styles of the woman who uses it. Some women prefer to use a piano stool, but I do not think that that is a good idea. I believe that the chair should fit the overall style of the vanity itself.
Typical chair for use with a vanity. This is a fine antique version that shows off the wonderful woodwork and carving details.
Why Women Need a Quality Vanity
I argue that both men and women NEED a personal place or space. In the American sitcom “Married with Children”, the father of the family treasured “his” bathroom in the basement. I have friends who have their own workshops or shed that are “theirs”. I am of the belief that we need to accept the importance of privacy in our own lives. We need to have our own spaces to take care of ourselves and relax in our own “personal space” free from interruption and concern.
Illustration of a woman brushing her hair at a vanity. These article of furniture are very important, and care must be exercised in their selection.
For the woman of a family, she is often kept quite busy with family responsibilities, the children and a multitude of other tasks. it is her time getting preened in front of the mirror that should be her little space…her little bit of time… her place where she can relax, center herself and devote all her attention on one thing, and one thing only; looking beautiful.
Conclusion
"My mom always had her own bathroom, vanity, and dressing area. It was filled with things that fascinated me as a little girl. Things that smelled nice and had fancy packaging. My dad also had his own area consisting of a workshop and office. I was also fascinated with his area and used to look inside of his toolboxes and ask him what all of these odd-looking things were for.
Husband and I are the same way. I will not share a bathroom, closet, or dressing area with my husband and made it perfectly clear before we married. He has his personal space as well. I think this is extremely important in a marriage and contributes to overall harmony in the house. Men and women are different and complimentary. Everyone needs their own stuff and personal space for said stuff."
Life is far too short to ignore the things that are important. If you are part of a traditional family, then you must take the time, the resources and the money to buy the best vanity that you can afford. It is important for the woman of the house.
It is the woman who will keep the household together in a wildly careening world. She must be given the necessary equipment to maintain the family unit to the best of her abilities. It is the responsibility of the man to recognize this fact, and to take action to make it happen.
Today we live in a world where everyone carelessly announces the desserts they eat, and what their favorite colors are to complete strangers. There are people, known as trolls, that make fun of these people, and find joyous abandon in making fun of everything they find on line. Yet the fact remains, we as people need some time alone. We need to compose ourselves and to gather our life about us. We need to define life on our terms. A pleasant space, and a moment of solitude can do wonders in this regard.
Another antique vanity table and mirror. Note that this mirror is an oblong oval shape along the horizontal axis. It is perfect for the woman to get herself ready for the day.
Posts Regarding Life and Contentment
Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this
post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss
growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with
the society within communist China. As there are some really stark
differences between the two.
More Posts about Life
I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified
about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.
Stories that Inspired Me
Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that
are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a
personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome
to come and enjoy a read or two as well.
This article was written in response to a discussion that I had with a friend of mine. He made the statement, “You wouldn’t be able to believe how these (Chinese) people lived! You and I could never live like that!” Turns out that he saw some propaganda from the UK and was convinced that the Chinese lived in windowless hovels. Not so. Not by a long shot.
Over the last thirty years, China has experienced a period of enormous growth. It began in the 1990’s. It started when the progressive socialist policies of Mr. Mao were replaced with the Free-Market Conservative policies of Mr. Deng. The result was predictable and resulted in an explosion in the overall quality of life for all Chinese people. A period of exceptional growth ensued and a middle class appeared. Here, we talk about the direct result of that change. We discuss the Apartment Houses that Chinese middle class live in.
Typically, most Chinese live in apartment complexes. There is a percentage, of course, that have their own houses. There are those that share, what we in the West refer to as “Townhouses”. There are those that occupy (rent-free) ancient dilapidated old complexes that can still be seen everywhere. (Why not? They might be old and ugly, but living in them is free!!!!) Not to mention, the others that live on farms, villages, and in the hinder-land.
Let’s talk about the Chinese apartment houses.
Chinese Apartments
In China, the apartment complex consists of an area that is surrounded with a fence and is guarded by guards (24-7) with video cameras and gates. Within that complex are the buildings that make up the complex. Now, in China, you might have a building that has three towers. Each tower would have it’s own set of elevators and access keys. The Chinese refer to these towers as “buildings”, so it can get a little confusing.
Here is an example of how a Chinese apartment complex works. Image is from Baidu which is sort of the Chinese equivalent of Google. Shown is the apartment complex whole, plus the various buildings and towers.
Above is a typical apartment complex. It is within an Apartment area and contains numerous large buildings. In the United States, we call these buildings “skyscrapers”. There are three towers in the example above. They share the foundations and the first three floors. They also share the underground garage. There are also other buildings. In China, when you work the employer must be able to provide you food and housing. Though you can opt out if you prefer.
The Gate
Every apartment complex is surrounded by a fence and a main gate. At the gate is a little guard house, a gate and biometrics. To enter any housing complex you need to show that you are a resident. Further, as a resident you will be given an electronic card-key or fob that will enable you to enter the apartment area. As is common in China today, everyone is monitored by CC Cameras, and recorded in the event that some crime is committed and there is a need to identify the perp. The gates are always manned 24-7.
Parking
Typically, most apartments have interior parking and exterior parking. The exterior parking is for short term parking. At my apartment complex, the fee is 10 RMB/hour if you park outside.
When you enter the front gate the license plate reader scans your car and records your entry time. Then when you leave you will need to pay the guard (BaoAn) the amount you owe. You can pay electronically, as most do. Typically people use Alipay or WeChat to pay. They just scan the QR code using their cell phone when the guard comes to the door.
Underground parking is reserved for residents. Typically there is a monthly fee that everyone needs to pay. I have heard different rates, but here in Zhuhai the rate is around 300 RMB/month.
The parking garages are unlike that which you will find in the USA. They are not dingy, grimy, dusty or anything like that. They are not at all dim or poorly it. They tend to be very clean, almost like you could eat off the floor in them. They are also spacious and well lit. Here is a Chinese chick in a micro-video in an underground parking garage. It’s pretty typical.
Anyways, the point here is that the parking garages are treated quite differently than they are in the United States. There is a staff that monitors them, cleans them, and makes sure that they are well lit and well taken cared for. Additionally, the care and concern for a given parking garage is a reflection of the owner of the apartment house in the building. As a result, many apartment underground parking garages are very nice and well maintained in China.
Building Access
Once you enter the apartment complex, you will typically need to walk through a park, or park-like area. The Chinese are very big on natural spaces in their apartment complexes. This area will have paths, exercise equipment, a few outside games like basketball or ping-pong, and an abundance of shrubs and trees. Even if the park area is on the third floor (typical in many cities).
Some parks share space with outside parking, while others are for pedestrians and doggies only. All of the parks have lighting, trashcans, places to sit, sleep, and have fun. Many have fountains (though whether or not they work, is hit or miss), and some have pools. Like the underground garage, you will have to pay to swim in the pool in your building. Typically it is 30 to 50 yuan per person per year. (From $5 to $10 USD.)
Here is a Chinese gal dancing on an apartment complex park. It looks like the third floor. As you can see, there are large areas to dance and exercise in (a very important thing in China as everyone loves to dance) and areas of grass and trees.
The pools tend to be shallow. With the deepest section rarely over 1.5 meters deep (about five feet). They are always tended and cared for, just like swimming pools are in the USA. However, they generally do not have life guards. The residents are expected to take care of themselves and to watch the younger kids and children.
Once you walk through this park-like area you will make your way to your building entry. If you are in an apartment that has, say five towers with one shared foundation, then you would enter the entrance directly associated with your tower. There are some buildings that have one central access point, while others have different access points depending on which tower you live in.
You will need an access key or FOB to get into the building. So, in case you are wondering, yes you need two keys to enter your building in China. One key is to the apartment complex, a second key to enter your apartment tower.
Elevator
Once you enter the building you will pass through a large open area that will hold mailboxes and some sofas and chairs for guests to wait for you. These are typically well lit and with marble or stone floors and walls.
You will pass through this area and go to the elevator area. In towers that are over 25 floors there are typically multiple elevators that run to pre-specified floors. For instance, one elevator might go from 1 – 25th floor, while another might run from 1, then 26th to the 50th floor. Some apartment buildings have elevators that run to only odd floors, while others run to even floors. All, in all, it cuts down on the waiting time in tall buildings.
Like what is common in many hotels in China, you will also need your apartment key or FOB to run the elevator. The elevator will not work (in many cases) unless you have a residence FOB.
Front Door to the Apartment
The front door will more than likely have “good luck” symbols on the door. These will be red designs with gold or black trim. This will consist of the symbol for “fortune”, either right side up or upside down and certain lucky sayings. It is a tradition to get new door decorations at the start of each Chinese New Year (CNY).
The doors will use a key that has nothing in common with American keys. American keys tend to be a flat bar of metal that has slots cut into it. Chinese keys come in different cross sections, including rectangular, triangular, circular, half-moon, and all with certain different kinds of security protections. Back twenty years ago, say around 2000, crime was rampant and people were constantly getting broken into. These different key types each come with their own unique blanks and procedures to open and replace. Indeed, you have to be a key-smith expert to be able to break into any Chinese houses today.
Triangular shaped key blank. Here, you can make different key patterns for FOUR elements of the key. This particular blank is available on Alibaba. Not available in the USA, if not outright banned. (After all, how can the police, FBI, NSA, CIA, DHS, and IRS be able to come in if you are not cooperative?)
Most homes built in the last ten years all have biometrics. You need either a finger print or retinal scan to enter. Alternatively there is typically a key pad that is available if you want to be a little “old school” about home security.
Once inside – the apartment
Most Chinese apartments are much, much smaller than their American counterparts. they range in size from very tiny 40 square yard affairs, to 70 square yard, 120 square yard, 300 square yard, and up to 500 square yard apartments. Most Chinese people that I know own their house. They paid for it in cash. They live in a 70 to 120 square yard house.
The 40 square yard apartment is very tiny. It’s just big enough for a bed, a bathroom, and a refrigerator. Many that are being made now are called “lofts”. They fit an upstairs in this tiny space so that you can sleep above a very cozy living room.
The 70 square yard apartment is still small, but it is big enough for one (or two) bedrooms, a nice bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room. There is always a porch and a washing area. Many young professionals and first time home owners select this size of house to live in.
The 120 square yard apartment is pretty much ideal for the expanding family. It consists of three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, a dining room and a living room. Of course there is a porch and laundry area.
Many Chinese families have the parents living with them. This is a long standing Chinese tradition where the parents of the oldest sun moves in with the family. They then take care of the new children of the family. The 200 to 300 square yard layout is perfect for this larger family. There will be three or four bedrooms, two bathrooms, large living room and dining room, and a very spacious kitchen.
There are many kinds of apartments in China, however we can distill most of them into the following format and understanding…
Attributes of a Chinese Apartment
Firstly, notice that there are no rugs or carpeting. The Chinese prefer solid stone flooring. This flooring is typically white or off-white. In just about every apartment that I have been to, liven in or visited, the floor was solid stone slab.
Secondly, note that the walls are not plain. There are adornments. The Chinese hire interior decorators to render the walls “comfortable” and suitable for a household. The walls are either painted white, tiled in sheet stone or marble, or tiled in white tile. It seems like the videos are of a mansion, but nope, it’s a real honest-to-goodness middle class house.
Sometimes the houses have a wooden or FRS decking floor. This is a rather recent innovation. Those apartments that have this wooden floor typically use it for the bedrooms, or other “soft” areas.
One of the first things you notice when you get into a Chinese house is that there is a rack of shoes near the door. It is typical in most Asian countries to take off your outside shoes and wear house slippers inside. You can see this in this next video. Here’s a chick in her apartment being cute…
Another thing about living in these towers is that they are really, really high up. Falling off the balcony is not an option when you are on the 36 floor. With that said, you often are able to get really, really outstanding views.
Now, if you are in the middle of a city, like downtown Shenzhen or Shanghai, you might find (much to your dismay) that your view is blocked and all that you can see is the apartment tower across the street. That really sucks. However, just moving to a different apartment on the same floor might provide you with an amazingly different view. Some, heck most, are just stunning.
Conclusion
I think that by looking at how other people live in distant parts of the globe, we can see our similarities and our differences in a new light. I believe that that knowledge is very important. It shows us our place on this planet and where we exist in the universe.
Rather than buying into the constant drum roll towards endless wars against some kind of cardboard cut out of what our “enemies” are, we can make the judgements ourselves. We no longer need to be blindly led towards more outrageously expensive and heart-rendering wars. War, mind you at only benefits the 0.01% of global elite.
I am tired of it. It’s a non-stop onslaught of war! war! war! propaganda. It’s all about getting YOU (yes, you) to buy into the notion that there must be a war to be fought. Whether it is against some tiny banana republic or a huge nation like China or Russia.
People are people. We eat. We sleep. We work. We have families. There are more things in common with each other, than our disagreements. That is the truth. All you need to do is step outside the USA bubble and look around a bit. Open your eyes.
The BBC’s editors yesterday printed the article (above) — but sprinkled it with links (see picture below) which powerfully proved the critics’ point that the BBC is biased against China.In effect, the BBC said “we’re not anti-China — by the way, here’s a link to an article showing how China is a dystopian hellscape! And another one. And another one. And another one. And . . “.It’s hard not to laugh.
E-Hang’s electric VT-30 travels 300km in 100 minutes. With eight propellers, two fixed wings, and a propeller at the rear, it achieves a balance of hybrid lift and push, so needs no runway. Its tri-redundant, fly-by-wire controls can be flexibly altered for multiple modes, implying a much higher safety level for the aircraft. 
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