A sitrep on geopolitical events regarding global world changes April 2022

I can't remember a time when war propaganda has been this intense.

-dwp

Crappy title regarding a strange period of time.

Well,  the world is quickly switching from one uni-polar governmental operation to a multi-polar one. And we are watching it in real time. Oh, sure, the “West” is kicking up a fuss, and the United States is in hysterics, but that will fade in time.

Sometime, hopefuly sooner than later, the United States will decide to scrap the decades old RAND plans and accept a new reality.

However, that will have to be forced by necessity, and the rest of the world is waiting for that moment to come. Hopefully sooner than later, as the longer it is delayed, the larger the risk of catastrophic fiasco.

Here, we continue on our menu of current events, and toss in views of what we all used to have. It is a lfiestyle that predates the neocon monsters that have corrupted the United States government so badly. I hope you enjoy this article.

Been there. Done that.

daily picdump 58 3
Been there.

Young boy picks out a girl

This video has been making it’s arounds. A boy is in a Business KTV, and when the girls come out in the lineup, he runs up and picks a girl immediately. LOL video 8MB

The “news” about China

China is falling apart. Andy day now… any day now… the people will “rise up” and accept democracy™ and freedom™. That’s the narrative, don’t you know. Of course the idiots regurigating this bullshit have exactly zero experience with China. They are fine “cannon fodder”. LOL!

From Drudge Report 8APR22.

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2022 04 08 16 05

The fiction is “off the charts”.

On the domestic side

you will only get it if you are married to a man 11
You will only get it if you are married .

Singapore abstains from UN vote on Russia: MFA says awaiting probe on human rights violation in Ukraine

Singapore suddenly adjusted her pro US foreign policy, they now are not so trigger-happy against Russia.  Abstention in UN vote: MFA says Singapore is awaiting findings on human rights violation in Ukraine

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President Biden tells us what defines America

The joke is on democrazy.

NATO is mobilized to confront China

Orders from the USA.
Ukraine-Russia war: China needs to condemn Moscow’s invasion says NATO boss

Apparently, NATOs intention is to control the world, not self defence :

  • NATO to deepen ties with Asian partners amid China’s refusal to condemn Russia – World – TASS
  • Unreasonable, sinister for NATO to push China to condemn Russia – Global Times

Spicy Bean and Beef Pie

This has everything. Meat pie. Beef. beans, and taste! The key is the unique set of ingredients. But all are commonly available.

exps4622 FM153592D03 18 1b 2
Spicy Bean and Beef Pie.

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 2 to 3 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1 can (11-1/2 ounces) condensed bean with bacon soup, undiluted
  • 1 jar (16 ounces) thick and chunky picante sauce, divided
  • 1/4 cup cornstarch
  • 1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
  • 1 teaspoon paprika
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 1 can (16 ounces) kidney beans, rinsed and drained
  • 1 can (15 ounces) black beans, rinsed and drained
  • 2 cups shredded cheddar cheese, divided
  • 3/4 cup sliced green onions, divided
  • Dough for double-crust deep-dish pie
  • 1 cup sour cream
  • 1 can (2-1/4 ounces) sliced ripe olives, drained

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 425°. In a large skillet, cook beef over medium heat until beef is no longer pink. Add garlic; cook 1 minute longer. Drain. In a large bowl, combine soup, 1 cup picante sauce, cornstarch, parsley, paprika, salt and pepper. Fold in beans, 1-1/2 cups cheese, 1/2 cup onions and beef mixture.
  2. On a lightly floured surface, roll half the dough to a 1/8-in.-thick circle; transfer to a 9-in. deep-dish pie plate. Trim even with rim. Add filling. Roll remaining dough to a 1/8-in.-thick circle. Place over filling. Trim, seal and flute edge. Cut slits in top.
  3. Bake until crust is lightly browned, 30-35 minutes. Let stand for 5 minutes before cutting. Serve with sour cream, olives and remaining picante sauce, cheese and onions.

Serbia says it was blackmailed over UN vote

I am not really surprised.

Article

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American Diner

Once the go-to hangout spot for American teens and a symbol of opportunity for small business owners, diners are one of the most beloved remnants of mid-century America.

Scattered across the country, diners come in many shapes and forms, from roadside railcar-style establishments to tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurants in the country’s biggest cities.

Here’s what diners looked like during their heyday...

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American Diner.

Republica – Ready to Go (Official Video)

Big British group from the 1990s. They made a splash on the music scene and then faded away. They maintained domestic signifigance for some time, but most of the world remains unaware of them.

Good Map ever of Ukraine.

It’s from the Western leadership. So it’s really not all that accurate. But it’s a good map never the less. You can zoom in, and all that. The actual military territories and Russian locations are entirely deceptive. It seems that Russia has made no gains. But that’s not the intention. This is not World War I. Don’t “pull a Hitler” and maintain 19th century thinking.

2022 04 10 21 48
2022 04 10 21 48

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ok Map

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Beijing warns of ‘forceful measures’ if Nancy Pelosi visits Taiwan

It is possible that China may declare Taiwan airspace a “no fly zone”. If so, in this senario, they will shoot down any Taiwan jet and destroy Taiwan military bases that dare to fire the first shot.
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It’s possible, but not probable.
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Imagine if “Xi the great” follows “Putin the great” to declare a ban on accepting US currency.  What will happen to the Western economies, their cost of living, manufacturing supply chain, currency value, and world confident in Holding US treasury debt?
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The truth is that the United States is playing a zero sum game, and blindly believe in its might with nary a second thought.
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  • US House Speaker is expected to arrive in Taipei on Sunday, according to media reports
  • Beijing says Washington ‘must be fully responsible for the consequences’ if it goes ahead
Article

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Nancy Pelosi postpones Asia trip after testing positive for Covid-19

Imagine that. What “bad luck”.
A US Congressional delegation to Asia has been postponed after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tested positive for Covid-19.

The announcement followed a warning by China that it would take strong measures if the trip included a visit to Taiwan, as media reports in the region had claimed.

Pelosi's deputy communications director Drew Hammill said in a tweet on Thursday that the planned Congressional delegation to Asia, to be led by Pelosi over the two-week Congressional break, "will be postponed to a later date."

"After testing negative this week, Speaker Pelosi received a positive test result for Covid-19 and is currently asymptomatic. The Speaker is fully vaccinated and boosted, and is thankful for the robust protection the vaccine has provided. The Speaker will quarantine consistent with CDC guidance, and encourages everyone to get vaccinated, boosted and test regularly," Hammill tweeted.
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Article What terrible luck, eh?

Railcar style diner

Railcar-style diners were modeled after rail carriages or sometimes converted from the original train cars into stand-alone eateries. Diners were constructed in factories and then shipped to their destinations, much like mobile homes, and were relatively affordable to purchase at just $1,000.

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2022 04 08 15 19

Once they arrived, the utilities simply had to be connected. Since diners, or “lunch cars,” had to be shipped using a truck or railcar, they were designed to be narrow.

AUKUS is “Anglo-Saxon small bloc” to serve U.S. hegemony: Chinese FM spokesperson-Xinhua

It’s pretty obvious, and if you tabulate all the public speeches from the USA and from Australia, you can clearly see that the Chinese spokesperson is just stating facts. Why this is signifigant is that the Chinese government is officially recognizing that a military build up prior to an American invasion / war upon China is the purpose of AUKUS.

Listen to the video full content:

Listen

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New Jersey Diners

At one point, nearly 95% of the shippable restaurants were manufactured in New Jersey.

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New Jersey Diner.

New Jersey’s oldest diner, the Summit Diner, opened in 1929, was rebuilt in 1938, and is still open today.

China and Russian Trade in Yuan

China is buying Russian energy with its own currency, marking the first commodities paid for in yuan since Western sanctions hit Moscow.

Here…

Article 1

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And Here…

Article 2

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Until the Great Depression, most diners could be found in the Northeast.

After World War II ended and the suburbs began to boom, more and more people began opening diners nationwide.

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Typical diner interior.

The small businesses could prove extremely profitable for owners. Since the restaurants themselves were so small, and the kitchens so narrow, not many employees were required.

Sneaker Pimps 6 Underground/Lyrics/Kelli Ali

A top charter in the mid-1990s. I wonder if anyone remembers this song. I think it kind of defined what it was like in those years.

Chinese democracy seems to work pretty good.

In a comparative sense. But America has “American” democracy™. That’s superior Right?

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2022 04 08 14 43

With the implementation of cross-country highways in the 1960s, diners continued to grow in popularity.

Travelers along the new highways could stop off and grab a quick bite at the roadside establishments.

2022 04 08 15 24Interior of a roadside diner.

Many diners featured a row of bar stools along a counter, allowing many people to be served without much effort from the diner’s staff.

Sophie B. Hawkins – Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover

Here’s a “blast from the past”. This song was pretty famous back in the 1990s. It is about… well, you know… there is a person, a certain someone… that you really like. But, you know, there are taboos and you cannot have a relationship with that person.

The way the world works

Yeah. This guy has it all figured out. video 14MB

I Don’t Know Who’s Great Resetting Who Anymore

I don’t think you people understand how big of a deal all this economic stuff that is happening actually is. It’s very difficult even for me to watch it all playing out in real time.

Basically, the whole world had agreed to a US-run financial system that was outside of the realm of politics. Then, the United States decided to violate international law and ban Russia from the global financial system, ostensibly because they believed that Vladimir Putin is a very mean person.

This is not smart. There is no strategy here.

RT:

Global economies will be rethinking how safe it is to rely on the US dollar in their foreign currency holdings, the deputy head of the International Monetary Fund, Gita Gopinath, said on Tuesday.

The statement comes after half of Russia’s forex holdings were effectively confiscated by international financial institutions amid sanctions placed on Moscow following the launch of its military operation in Ukraine.

“We are likely to see some countries reconsidering how much they hold of certain currencies in their reserves,” she stated in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine.

Gopinath said the IMF sees “increasing fragmentation” in global payments systems as one of the consequences of the current events. However, she stated that the US dollar, traditionally considered the world reserve currency, is not likely to suffer an “imminent demise.”

Still, depending on how long the crisis in Ukraine lasts, there could be larger effects, Gopinath said. 

I don’t know how many hardline “everything is a conspiracy” people read this website.

Personally, I’m a moderate conspiracy guy. As a rule, I only publish conspiracies that can be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. In terms of my personal mind, I believe some conspiracies that I wouldn’t publish, because I understand they can’t be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

There is some gray area, of course. You can use deductive logic to conclude something without necessarily having all of the facts documented. For example: when the CIA (or one of its tentacles) releases documents admitting to doing some dastardly thing decades earlier, and then says “yeah, but we stopped doing that,” you can deduce that they are almost certainly still doing it.

The logic is:

      • They lied about doing it in the first place while they were doing it
      • They have a history of saying they stopped doing things and then getting caught still doing them
      • If they were doing it in the first place, and nothing has changed, they still view it as worth doing
      • Everything they want to do in secret is done in secret, under the guise of national security
      • They’ve repeatedly demonstrated that there is no consideration of any type of morality in their secret deeds
      • etc.

So, with for example any of the human experiments that the CIA was involved in – whether it be testing chemical weapons on the public or doing mind control techniques on patients in psych wards – you can assume with very high confidence that, given that they’ve admitted to doing these things in the past, they are still doing them now.

Viewing Everything That Happens as a Conspiracy Can Lead to Tangled-Up, Nonsensical Thinking

I am the first person to admit “conspiracies are real.” I am not some rabid person who goes around condemning people as “conspiracy theorists.” I’m always interested in hearing people out. I think I’m about as open-minded as a person can be without having a gaping hole in my head. I like engaging people in discussion of every kind of idea.

The World Economic Forum’s Great Reset is the most obvious conspiracy of the current year. I don’t “believe” in this – I know it is real, because I’ve read their publications, and seen their policies enacted around the world. However, you have to match your beliefs with facts with reality, or you end up getting sucked into a void.

There is a sect of people who think everything is a conspiracy, and use backward logic to explain anything that happens as part of the conspiracy. Again, I don’t know how many of these people there are, and I know that these people tend to be much more vocal on the internet than people who are not in this subculture. But I have seen a lot of people claim some version of “the West is using the Russia conflict to destroy its own economic system on purpose.”

These people are correct in stating that the US and the rest of the West have a plan – this “Great Reset” thing – to make basically everyone poor, jobless, living in state housing and eating state food, ultimately reducing the population so that the elite can dominate the limited resources remaining on earth. (If you follow the WEF documents and presentations, they are very big into the idea that they are going to use emerging technology to basically become immortal, extending their lives through gene therapy and bionic implants and such, so they believe they will need these resources to build an empire in outer space. They literally believe that and you can read it on their website. It’s not a “theory.”)

So, when you see them destroying the global economic system, it is easy to say “see, this is that thing.”

And indeed: they are clearly spinning this stuff in that direction. You see US officials coming out and saying that it’s time to start riding the bus if you can’t afford an \$80,000 Tesla.

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2022 04 08 10 52
Earlier this month Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told American families to buy electric vehicles if they desire gas savings, now he’s telling them to take the bus.https://t.co/r5Iw6UA9cB pic.twitter.com/CKqrviNwDA

— MRCTV (@mrctv) March 22, 2022

This is clearly part of the program, and they’re exploiting the Ukraine situation to push this agenda.

Meanwhile in France, their dictator just came out and said that he’s going to start issuing food rations when everyone starts starving because of a border skirmish in the former USSR.

However, “everything is going according to plan” just doesn’t work, because ultimately, these big decisions on the geopolitical stage regarding the dollar as reserve currency only serve to empower China.

China can’t be sanctioned because they produce too much of what America uses. China has also formed a global trade network that they could use to blockade the United States.

Diners became popular due to their large menus featuring American food staples like hamburgers, fries, and club sandwiches.

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Diners were popular.

Most diners had galley kitchens that made it easier for cooks to move from one dish to another, making service quicker than in a traditional restaurant.

An American couple adopts a Chinese orphan

Heartwarming. video 34MB

Speaking of hamburgers…

awesome photos 2American burgers.

Do you think that I am giving enough airtime to the humble American hamburger, or is more time needed?

Here’s an accurate meme posted by a Chinese official:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that when the West talks about the "int'l community", they mean: pic.twitter.com/RZNOwDymX2

— Lijian Zhao 赵立坚 (@zlj517) March 17, 2022
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2022 04 08 10 50

Saudi Arabia is going to start trading oil in yuan.

Countries are going to start dumping dollar reserves.

America is going to be a third world country, while China becomes the dominant world power.

So then, if you are going to say that this is all going according to plan, you have to say that the US leadership wants to transfer all of its global power to the Chinese.

But why?

That’s where the hang-up is. It doesn’t make any sense why the US and Western establishment would be interested in transferring power to China.

In order to square that circle, you have to really start going into nutty type conspiracies. And when I say “nutty,” I’m saying that not as an insult, but as an objective descriptor. You would have to come up with an explanation as to how China is secretly on-board with the global Western (frankly, primarily Jewish) agenda.

There is no indicator of that, really at all. In fact, China’s culture is virtually the diametric opposite of Western Jewish culture.

I wrote about this in some detail: What About China, Then?

To make it make sense, you are forced into a few necessary assertions, all of which are fantastical:

  • China has a secret deal with Western powers to implement a feminist-anal-tranny-Jewish slave grid
  • China purposefully did the reverse of the feminist-anal-tranny-Jewish agenda instead of a push for democracy (I guess as some kind of fake-out)
  • For some reason, China has refused all Western attempts to “democratize” (another fake-out?)
  • The Taiwan occupation, the Western-backed Hong Kong riots, and every other thing that the US has done to try to undermine Chinese society was part of a massive fake-out (who are they faking out? People on internet forums?)
  • The West has some kind of secret mechanism through which to ensure that China upholds this theoretical secret agreement, which is why they are willing to surrender all global power to China upfront, without any visible guarantees that China will uphold the secret agreement

None of this, to me, is serious in any way. People try to work backwards from what they see happening, then they hit the brick wall of these fantastical and possibly outright nonsensical assertions which are necessary to uphold the logic train they are riding.

There is no way to say this is all part of the plan without saying the plan is to transfer all power to China, and there is no explanation of why that would be the plan.

The hardline conspiracy people will then start listing off a series of allegedly unexplainable questions, rather than confront the underlying hard wall their logic has hit.

For example:

  • Why would the US transfer its manufacturing base to China in the 1990s?
  • Why would the US implode its own economy and status as a world power?
  • Why are the Chinese allowed to invest in Western infrastructure?

These are fair questions and worth considering. But to claim that the only possible explanation is “a secret deal with the Chinese,” despite the stated problems with that theory, is absurd.

My explanations for these questions are simpler: in general, I would answer those questions with “the West made bad decisions.” I would attribute these bad decisions by a decadent and decaying elite feebly attempting to manage complex systems they don’t understand.

With the first question – the issue of transferring the manufacturing base – this was well documented at the time. Western think-tanks explained in a virtually infinite number of white papers and books that when the Chinese quality of living was escalated, they would “democratize” and integrate with the West. Needless to say, that did not happen. Instead, China installed a new Emperor who organized a wide-ranging program to promote ultranationalism and reinforce traditional Chinese cultural values.

Samuel P. Huntington, who died in 2008 at the age of 81, is one of the globalist thinkers who disagreed with the consensus, arguing that China could, unlike Western countries, modernize and still maintain traditional culturally conservative values, which would then make it “unintegratable” into the Western order, which is based on modernist ideas.

If anyone wants to understand Huntington’s predictions further, they can read his book “Clash of Civilizations.” It’s kind of boring if you don’t have all the background knowledge, but not particularly difficult for someone with high school level reading skills.

This is the map he gave of the different civilizations that were to “clash” in the modern world:

You can overlay that with the above Chinese meme about the “international community.”

Meanwhile, China has spent the last two decades reaching out to these various other civilizations, and most of them get along very well with the Chinese. During the same two decades, the West has been engaged in brutal, pointless, and very expensive wars, serving no clear purpose anyone can explain beyond “Israeli security interests.” (Those countries could have been conquered a lot easier with Netflix and pornography, but the Jews wanted war. That’s the theme of all of this – the globalist agenda is continually undermined by bizarre Jewish psychology.)

The Chinese have also peddled a lot of influence in the West, primarily through being productive and exploiting the transnational ideology of the West.

Finally, to be clear: I don’t doubt that Western politicians have been bribed or that the Democrat Party in particular has a fair number of Chinese intelligence operatives and assets. The story of Fang-Fang the Chinese spy going around having sex with American politicians seems to be true, and that has probably happened a lot without the spies getting identified. But espionage and intelligence operations fit into my paradigm, rather than the “everything that happens wouldn’t happen unless it was a conspiracy” paradigm.

A glimpse of Japan

So cute. video 11MB

Chinese girl in a furry top

She almost looks like a doll. Sheech! video 2MB

“Does China have running water?”

A typical dumb-ass American viewpoint. video 8MB

‘Til Tuesday – Voices Carry

A blast from the past!

As well as being quicker to make, dishes served at diners were cheaper, too.

Items like pancakes, sausages, meatloaf, burgers, and sandwiches were typically served in the restaurants and still are in diners today.

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Good cheap food was available at diners.

The meals were low-priced, making diners popular even before their rise in the 1950s. During the Great Depression , diners provided an inexpensive way for families to go out to eat.

It’s the Same with Russia

These same kinds of issues come up when talking about how Putin is secretly working for Klaus Schwab – but those arguments aren’t even really important enough to address, because at this point, Russia is a de facto proxy state of China. To elaborate: China and Russia are in a binding alliance, and China is a much more powerful country than Russia, therefore: de facto proxy state – at least as regards Russia’s moves on the geopolitical stage. If China was allied with America, Russia would already be crushed (that’s why so many people tried to warn American planners that they had to choose one or the other).

Putin and the Russians obviously have their own objectives and so on; I don’t think they are a vassal state of the Chinese. But it is clear that Putin made sure the Ukrainian intervention was approved by China, and they would not have approved it if they didn’t think it served their interests. As we’ve seen, it has very much served their interests. Frankly, I am virtually positive that the Chinese knew how the US would react and did the math on how this would play out, ultimately resulting in the collapse of the dollar, and thereby the American Empire.

Meanwhile, by every single fact we are able to observe, the decadent leaders of the West are acting as though Russia and China are Iraq and Libya. It appears that they genuinely believe they can use brute force and threats of brute force to come out on top in this conflict. (It’s also worth mentioning that the West, due to the ultra-low moral character of its leaders and the utter lack of any unifying ideal beyond anal sex, has lost the ability to cooperate cohesively as a single body in the way that the Chinese do.)

Please note: Unlike the theoretical secret deals between the West and the Chinese (or Russia), the deals between China and Russia are very much visible and are largely committed to paper.

The West started this conflict, of course. I don’t know when they realized Russia was going to move into the Ukraine, but they had ample opportunity to prevent it by simply agreeing to the previous status quo. They appear to believe that they can create a protracted conflict in the Ukraine like they did when Russia invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s. That shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the situation. Ukraine has historically been a part of Russia. There is not really any such thing as a “Ukrainian identity” outside of being a vassal state. In the west of the country, they tend to feel closer to Poland, and there is some bad blood all around with regards to the USSR. But none of this is in any way similar to fanatical Islam. The US has backed neo-Nazism as a kind of “Ukrainian ISIS,” but you can’t rally a country around cartoonish neo-Nazism (particularly while the entire leadership of the country is Jewish).

The idea of using neo-Nazis as rebels against a Russian occupation or a Russia-backed government in the Ukraine is nonsensical, and reeks of the kind of stupid thinking that led to America’s Afghan debacle. The US government pays people to lie to them, and when people tell the truth, they get fired and end up on obscure livestream interviews answering superchats. These liars are telling the decision-makers that the Ukraine is Afghanistan and a protracted conflict can be used to drain Russia, which will ultimately result in the collapse of the Putin government.

The fact that they have no idea what they’re doing is blatant in the fact that they are sanctioning the entire Russian race. Putin’s support is going up rapidly among the people, many of whom didn’t like his policies before but now feel compelled to rally around him since they are being attacked personally for their race by the West.

Diners typically operate around the clock, allowing patrons to stop by at any time for a meal.

Since diners are open all night long, many pop culture depictions of diners involve a feeling of loneliness and isolation.

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Diners were open 24 hours.

Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting “Nighthawks” shows a diner and its few occupants late at night. The painting is based on a diner in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

So, China Ruling the World, Huh?

We are clearly facing down a world ruled by the Chinese. A lot of people are uncomfortable with that. But most of the discomfort comes from the idea that the Chinese are somehow going to rule us in the same fashion that the US has ruled the world since World War II. They have no such plans for us. The Chinese have a vision of conquering the world through commerce, rather than war, threats of war, and geopolitical maneuvering.

We started out on the issue of the economic dominance of the US, and that economic dominance is indeed the key to everything. However, US economic dominance was entirely a result of US military might.

The reigning US philosophy for global economic dominance has been: “we will literally bomb you.”

Conversely, the Chinese philosophy has been: “we will sell you high quality products at reasonable prices.”

Chinese people do not really even understand what white people are, and they don’t have very much interest in learning. If a Chinese person outside of the major urban centers sees a white person, they don’t register them as a person, but rather as some kind of weird exotic creature that has popped up in their environment for mysterious reasons. The reaction is similar to if you were walking down the street, and saw Doraemon float in on a cloud.

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Doraemon float in on a cloud.

You might stop and look at him in awe, you might take out your phone and take a selfie, you might just ignore him completely because your brain cannot register the existence of a Doraemon floating around.

This is to say: it’s a purely insular culture, which Westerners do not understand any more than they understand us. As an example: instead of trying to trace their origins as a people, the Chinese believe – and teach children in school – that China has always existed. In their thinking, China is the “Middle Kingdom” that sits between Heaven and a mass of strange barbarians who may be interested in buying products.

When the Mongols consistently raided them, stealing their women and wealth on horseback and riding off with the booty, they said “cannot allow.” Instead of mounting an army to crush the Mongols, they built a gigantic wall, and told the Mongols that if they wanted Chinese products, they would have to buy them at the wall.

It is precisely the same logic as a Chinese immigrant family setting up a store in an all black neighborhood and covering the counter, cash register, and expensive items with bulletproof glass.

China has always been, fundamentally, a merchant empire, and that hasn’t changed. If it were not for the belligerence of the West, they wouldn’t have bothered to build up a large military at all. Historically, virtually every war the Chinese have fought has been a civil war, as they don’t look at the rest of the world as enemies or friends, but rather customers and potential customers.

China has de facto economic dominance over most of Southeast Asia and a lot of Africa. They’ve not interfered with any of these countries’ political processes, and they’ve shown no interest in doing so. I’ve repeatedly pointed out that they should have sent advisors to Burma during their (still ongoing) political crisis, given that they’ve got such a large stake in the Burmese economy, but they did not. Even when it is obviously to their benefit, and the problem would not be difficult to mediate, they stick to a policy of non-interference.

Similarly, they had huge investments in Vietnam, but made no attempt to interfere with the politics there. The locals started to resent Chinese being richer than locals. This ended up in massive pogroms of Chinese businesses in 2014. It didn’t get a lot of media attention in the West of course, but it was a pretty big deal. They burned more than a dozen factories, and were just smashing anything with Chinese characters on it (they can’t visibly tell the difference between each other, because Vietnamese people are really just Southern Chinese). They ended up accidentally smashing or burning a bunch of Taiwanese and even Japanese businesses (I guess they didn’t attack Korean businesses, because Korean characters have that circle thing that makes them really obvious).

Several people were killed. China’s response was basically “this is very disrespectful behavior. We cannot continue doing business with you.” They didn’t threaten them with a war, or try to do regime change. The Vietnamese government said they would secure Chinese investments, and then only arrested two people. (The Wikipedia page on these “protests” is not very good, but might be a starting point for people who want to look into it more.)

China pulled most of their investment, and Vietnam continued to pivot towards America, a country that they had relatively recently had a relatively brutal war with. Some Western-owned factories moved to Vietnam from China, but mostly the result of the pogroms and lack of action by the government to the pogroms just meant more money for Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia – countries where the local barbarians are more amenable to gentlemanly business practices.

Vietnam has effectively been cut out of the One Belt, One Road project, while the Chinese are doing expensive infrastructure projects and building factories everywhere else. Instead of using Vietnamese ports, China is going through neighboring Laos, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia, then running a waterway shipping line past Vietnam.

This is why they’re going crying to the US State Department about fishing waters. I guess we’ll see how that gamble works out for them. (Obviously, at some point, they’re going to end up begging for the Chinese to come back – assuming they don’t end up being used in some kind of Western military operation.)

Note this: America still has military in Thailand. However, when push comes to shove, Thais are going to side with the Chinese, because dumping money into a country works a lot better for building stable relations than putting your military inside a country.

Chinese girlfriend material

I call’s ’em as I see’s ’em. video 7MB

Baked Saucy Pork Chops

This little variation on Pork Chops is very, very delicious and so easy to make!

Baked Saucy Pork Chops EXPS SDDJ17 17351 B08 03 2b 31
Baked Saucy Pork Chops

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 2 bone-in pork loin chops (3/4 inch thick)
  • 1/4 cup chopped onion
  • 1/4 cup maple syrup
  • 2 tablespoons water
  • 1 tablespoon cider vinegar
  • 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 teaspoon chili powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/8 teaspoon garlic powder

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 350°. In a large skillet, heat butter over medium heat. Brown pork chops on both sides. Transfer to a greased 11×7-in. baking dish; sprinkle with onion.
  2. In a bowl, mix remaining ingredients; pour over chops. Bake, covered, until a thermometer inserted in pork reads 145°, 15-20 minutes. Let stand 5 minutes before serving.

Pay attention to this;

If the West wants to fight a bioweapons war, the East can do the same thing.

Two COVID Variants Just Combined Into a ‘Frankenstein’ Virus

The first subvariant of Omicron, the latest major variant of the novel coronavirus, was bad. BA.1 drove record cases and hospitalizations in many countries starting last fall.

The second subvariant, BA.2, was worse in some countries—setting new records for daily cases across China and parts of Europe.

After Biden and Blinkedin warned China that serious consequences would occur if China failed to sanction Russia, there have been outbreaks up and down China with this second subvariant BA.2. No other actions occured (aside fromt he mysterious mid-air breakup of a domestic airliner).

Now BA.1 and BA.2 have combined to create a third subvariant. XE, as it’s known, is a “recombinant”—the product of two viruses interacting “Frankenstein”-style in a single host.

With its long list of mutations, XE could be the most contagious form of the coronavirus yet. “From the WHO reports, it does appear to have a bit more of an edge in terms of transmissibility,” Stephanie James, the head of a COVID testing lab at Regis University in Colorado, told The Daily Beast.

But don’t panic just yet. The same mix of subvariants that produced XE might also protect us from it. Coming so quickly after the surge of BA.1 and BA.2 cases, XE is on track to hit a wall of natural immunity—the antibodies left over from past infection in hundreds of millions of people.

Those natural antibodies, plus the additional protection afforded by the various COVID vaccines, could blunt XE’s impact. For that reason, many experts worry less about XE and more about whatever variant or subvariant might come after XE.

Now, it appears that a deadly variant of the BA.2 has been detected in the USA. It's now known as XE.

The subvariant hasn’t shown up in U.S. tests yet. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t reached U.S. shores. “It might not be detected by the standard analysis pipeline,” Rob Knight, the head of a genetic-computation lab at the University of California, San Diego, told The Daily Beast. Major new forms of SARS-CoV-2 can require tweaks to testing methods.

XE is a nasty bug, owing to potentially dozens of mutations to its spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it grab onto and infect our cells. And it’s a strong reminder that the pandemic isn’t over. Even with widespread natural immunity and highly effective and safe vaccines, SARS-CoV-2 keeps finding pockets of unprotected people—and opportunities to evolve.

Article

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Diners have appeared in pop culture favorites like “Grease,” “Seinfeld,” “Gilmore Girls,” and “Twin Peaks.”

“In the movies, the diner is a special kind of space, a mythic place, a zone of escape,” film critic John Patterson told the BBC.

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2022 04 08 15 31

Suzanne Vega, who wrote the ’80s hit song “Tom’s Diner,” said, “The attraction of the diner is that it’s a sort of a midway point between the street and home.”

Trade is Better Than War

Frankly, if you read Thomas Jefferson – who was not an Orientalist – his vision for America was not dissimilar from that of the “Middle Kingdom” of China. He thought America should base its relationships with other countries on trade, rather than military or political antagonism (let alone moral lecturing).

This thinking was based primarily on the fact that the US had been a colony, and so understood the complexities of running an empire, which requires you to rule over people in foreign lands. Most all of the original American thinkers thought trade was a better way to interact with and influence the world than direct military rule.

Basically, this thinking ended with the Spanish-American war. Before that, America had wars, but they were all basically necessary (the Civil War is obviously complicated, but it was not a foreign war so doesn’t apply here). Because of the alleged sinking of the USS Maine by the Spanish – which turned out to be a fake news hoax – the US did an “intervention” in Cuba, and then “intervened” in the Philippines.

Irony of all ironies, however, the actual first “intervention” in a dumb foreign conflict was the support for the British during the Second Opium War.

The short story is: The US initially refused to get involved, and then were talked into sending a small number of troops by the British. After a few brief skirmishes, the US signed a neutrality agreement with China, effectively abandoning the British to their stupid adventure in global Jewish drug-peddling (the opium racket was run by the Jewish Sassoon family, and the entire scheme of conquering the Chinese by getting all the peasants addicted to drugs was a Jewish plan that the British went along with – the British have a proud history stretching back to Cromwell of cooperating with maniacal Jewish schemes). Then a US Navy commander went rogue and attacked the Chinese in defense of the British, claiming it was a race war, and “blood is thicker than water.” I agree with the sentiment, of course, but not in the context of a Jewish drug scheme on the other side of the planet.

So: our nation’s first stupid foreign adventure was against the Chinese as a part of a Jewish plot – and thus will be our last foreign adventure.

The Dragon’s Breath blows away the Empire of Dust.

Diners brought together people from different economic levels

Michael C. Gabriele, who wrote “The History of Diners in New Jersey,” told the Telegraph that “diners are the state’s ultimate gathering places — at any moment, high school students, CEOs, construction workers, and tourists might be found at a counter chatting with the waitresses and line cooks.”

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American diner.

During the civil rights movement, diners became a popular place for activists to hold “sit-ins” in restaurants that refused to seat black people, despite many of them employing black people to work there.

In 1964, Congress outlawed segregation through the Civil Rights Act, but many diners in the South continued to segregate their establishments, afraid that “seating blacks would drive away white patrons.”

Worse Things Have Happened to Better People

It goes without saying: no Chinaman ever tried to convince my son to cut his dick off. No Chinaman ever flooded my country with immigrants and pornography. No Chinaman ever called me “goy.”

China is not going to invade America. They are going to allow it to commit suicide. Over time, a new order will be established in America, and that new order will have the option of trading with China. Probably, during the chaos of this collapse, China will buy up a lot of the resources in America, and this will mean that a new emerging order will be tied in to the global economic order run by the Chinese. That’s unfortunate, but hey – your son gets to keep his dick.

A world with China as the central global superpower will be peaceful and based on independent countries engaging in voluntary commerce. It’s sad to see people getting so fussy over it.

I get that it’s also sad that the white man is not going to be the dominant force on the planet anymore. But in truth, we haven’t been for a long time. Everything that we associate with Western dominance in the modern age is really Jewish dominance.

Basically, 80 years ago, white people had a big war with each other and the good guys lost. Everything that’s happened since then has been effectively predetermined – a series of chaotic and revolutionary events driven by the chaotic and revolutionary spirit of the Jewish race. The Jews ultimately destroy everything. They can’t help themselves.

So, here we are.

Railcar-style diners are still manufactured in factories today, but they’re much more expensive to purchase and ship.

New diners can reportedly cost more than $1 million to produce, and restoring or renovating old ones can be extremely pricey as well. Instead, many ’50s-style diners in operation today are built on-site to cut costs.

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American diner.

US oil imports from Russia increase by 43%

If you are confused, well; welcome to the club.

In the past week, the US administration has increased its imports of Russian oil by 43%, reaching 100,000 barrels a day.
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Members Of Congress Are Now Using Words Like “Famine” And “Starvation” To Describe What Is Coming

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I have so much information to share with you today, and I will do my best to be brief. But be warned that this article is going to be longer than usual.  Global events are moving so quickly now, and I believe that they are going to move even more rapidly in the months ahead.  Sadly, the changes that we are witnessing will have a very real impact on the daily lives of every man, woman and child on the entire planet.  As I discussed yesterday, a global food shortage has arrived.  In fact, members of Congress are now using words like “famine” and “starvation” to describe what conditions will soon be like all over the world.

For example, U.S. Senator Joni Ernst just told Fox Business that our planet is facing “impending famine”

About 40 to 45 percent of the production in Ukraine will be decreased this year because of the war and the scarcity of supplies that go into the planting season. And we know that Ukraine also supports about 400 million people around the world with its food products. So we do see that we have an impending famine. And I’ve heard from David Beasley at the World Food Bank that he’s now going to have to take from the hungry to feed the starving.

And U.S. Senator Cory Booker has previously warned that we could soon see tens of millions of people “dying of starvation”

“Democrats and Republicans in Congress need to quickly come together and approve emergency global food aid in order to prevent tens of millions of people, including millions of children, from dying of starvation,” Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, told Reuters.

They aren’t exaggerating.

Even Joe Biden recently admitted that food shortages are “going to be real”.

The one thing that could provide a ray of hope would be an end to the war in Ukraine.

But it appears that isn’t going to happen any time soon.  In an interview with Fox News on Friday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that his nation will not accept anything less than “victory” in the war…

Special Report’s Bret Baier interviewed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday evening, touching on a wide variety of topics, including what a victory looks like for Ukraine and what Putin is hoping to achieve.

Baier asked the Ukrainian leader at the start of the interview how he believes the “war will end” prompting an explanation from Zelenskyy that only “victory” will be acceptable to his country.

Good luck with all that.

Now that the Russians have pulled their forces away from Kiev to focus on the eastern front, there is a lot less pressure on Zelenskyy to compromise on a peace deal.

And the fact that this conflict has made him one of the biggest celebrities on the entire planet actually gives him an incentive to keep it going.

Meanwhile, millions upon millions of people are already deeply suffering.  In Somalia, we are being warned that an “impending famine” is at the door…

What we are now seeing is impending famine similar to that which occurred in 2010/2011 in which more than a quarter of a million people died – including 133,000 children under the age of five. Although some donors have committed to fund Somalia’s Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) which seeks US$1.5 billion, not even 4% of funding required to meet Somalia’s humanitarian needs have been allocated. Like the novel coronavirus, which had impacted many of Somali households, the Ukraine crisis has driven inflation and rising costs in Somalia, particularly for food and energy, at a time when families are already incredibly desperate.

The reason why the situation in Somalia has become so desperate is because that nation normally gets more than 90 percent of its wheat from either Russia or Ukraine…

Finally, in the Horn of Africa 13 million people are already suffering from hunger. Ethiopia imports around 40 percent of its wheat from Russia and Ukraine, Kenya 30 percent, and Somalia over 90 percent.

Meanwhile, the food crisis in Yemen just continues to escalate.  One man that was recently interviewed admitted that he and his family “live like ants”

Experts are warning that the world faces a historic famine. The war in Ukraine is only one of many problems plaguing the global distribution of food.

In Yemen, Ghalib al-Najjar skips meals so that his children have enough food. He says he and his family “live like ants or fish…we eat what we can find.”

In Peru, rapidly rising prices for fuel and food have sparked massive nationwide protests

An ongoing wave of violent protests in Peru shows how the Russian invasion of Ukraine is affecting markets around the world, sparking unrest and deepening political divides.

Rising fuel costs originally triggered the protests, which started last week, but quickly intensified into large anti-government demonstrations with marches and road blockades.

So far at least six people have died in the chaos, and protesters continue to block at least nine major roads.

In Afghanistan, it is being estimated that 95 percent of the entire population does not have enough food to eat right now…

Afghanistan has faced grave hunger crises before. Two decades ago, people in the country were so hungry they resorted to eating wild grass.

But the situation in the country now is unprecedented.

Exacerbated by an unusually cold winter and the worst drought in decades, the economic upheaval that came with the Taliban takeover has left 95% of Afghans without enough food.

We haven’t seen anything like this in a really long time.

Overall, the World Food Program is warning us that “285 million people face starvation”

The World Food Program estimates that 285 million people face starvation.

The head of the World Food Program, former South Carolina Governor David Beasley, says the world food supply already faced a catastrophe before the war in Ukraine.

“We’re so short of funds already, and now with Ukraine, we’ve got 50-percent rations for people, for example, in Yemen, I’ve just cut 50 percent rations for eight million people. Niger, 50 percent rations, Chad 50 percent rations. And 50 percent don’t have anything, those who are in extreme need,” Beasley said.

Of course this is just the beginning.  As I specifically warned in Lost Prophecies and 7 Year Apocalypse, conditions will eventually become far more severe than they are at this moment.

Here in the United States, nobody is starving just yet, but the cost of living is escalating at a frightening pace.

According to a Bloomberg report, the average U.S. household will need to spend 5,200 dollars more just to have the same standard of living as last year…

“Inflation will mean the average U.S. household has to spend an extra $5,200 this year ($433 per month) compared to last year for the same consumption basket,” Bloomberg Economics reports.

Having to spend an extra $433 per month to get the same is a hefty, even gargantuan ask for anyone — especially parents who are already struggling to keep a roof over their kid’s heads and food on the table.

And our historic supply chain crisis just continues to get even worse.

In fact, the wait times for computer chips just hit another all-time record high

The wait times for semiconductor deliveries rose slightly in March, reaching a new high, after lockdowns in China and an earthquake in Japan further hampered supply.

Lead times — the lag between when a chip is ordered and delivered — increased by two days to 26.6 weeks last month, according to research by Susquehanna Financial Group.

The system is crumbling all around us, and we really are in the early stages of a full-blown economic implosion.

Initially, it will be the poorest nations that suffer the most.

Millions upon millions of innocent people don’t have enough to eat right now, and that number will rise with each passing day.

Normally, most Americans don’t pay too much attention to what is happening on the other side of the world, but food scarcity is growing in the United States too.

So if you and your family have enough food to eat tonight, you should be very grateful, because at least for now you are one of the lucky ones.

What Chinese houses look like

You know, you can easily see glimpses of China by looking at the backgrounds in the Douxing videos. here, we have a girl dancing in the front of her home, and in her living room. I can tell you that this is normal. This is what China is like, and to all those people who mistakenly believe that the Chinese nation is going to collapse any day, well… don’t hold your breath. video 2MB

Quick Chicken and Dumplings

Using precooked chicken and ready-made biscuits, this hearty dish is comfort food made simple. It’s the perfect way to warm up on chilly nights.

Quick Chicken and Dumplings EXPS CHKBZ18 45977 B10 19 2bC 6
Quick Chicken and Dumplings

Ingredients

  • 6 individually frozen biscuits
  • 1/4 cup chopped onion
  • 1/4 cup chopped green pepper
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 4 cups shredded rotisserie chicken
  • 3 cans (14-1/2 ounces each) reduced-sodium chicken broth
  • 1 can (4 ounces) mushroom stems and pieces, drained
  • 1 teaspoon chicken bouillon granules
  • 1 teaspoon minced fresh parsley
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried sage leaves
  • 1/4 teaspoon dried rosemary, crushed
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper

Directions

  1. Cut each biscuit into fourths; set aside. In a large saucepan, saute onion and green pepper in oil until tender. Stir in the chicken, broth, mushrooms, bouillon granules, parsley, sage, rosemary and pepper.
  2. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat; add biscuits for dumplings. Cover and simmer (do not lift cover while simmering) 10 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a dumpling comes out clean.

By the 1970s, the rise in fast-food restaurants led to a decline in the popularity of traditional diners.

As McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King restaurants continued to pop up nationwide, it became difficult for small business owners to compete with the huge corporations also selling cheap, convenient food.

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American diner.

While there were reportedly over 1,000 diners in New York City around 30 years ago, just 398 remained in 2015, according to a Crain’s New York Business article citing the city’s Department of Health records at the time.

England talks. China does.

video 4MB

Indonesia, Australia face limits in coal exports to Europe ahead of Russian ban

First Australia took a hit in coal exports to China, now their remaining market of Russia is also disappearing. <Insert snide remark here.> Article

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How You Know Tech is Grinding to a Halt

One way to view civilization collapse is to say that every nation dies when its marginal costs exceed potential profits. This means that each action is so encumbered — red tape, taxes, unions, corruption — that none of them are worth doing.

At that point, people stop trying to improve things and simply make do with what they have or stop using it. In this way, even technological civilizations revert to third world subsistence agriculture.

The Soviets went out hard because they imposed the burden of socialism on every action. The West has done the same with insurance, unions, high taxes, regulations, and diversity costs.

Individual industries do it too. You may notice that every software product you own is blighted with constant trivial updates, and that almost every company wants to sell you a “service” instead of a product.

For example, why own a software package like Microsoft Office when you can pay a monthly fee to use an online service “in the Cloud” (translation: on servers owned by someone else)? Makes sense, until you realize you are re-buying the software every ten years.

Microsoft realized it had a problem with Windows XP, Windows 7, and Office 2007: if you do something right enough, people will never buy another product unless forced. That means you need to downsize your company.

In other words, the end result of Microsoft would be to make a really good operating system and software, then fire everyone but five guys who answer the emails and keep selling the stuff.

Businesses need to find new horizons in order to stay ahead of this, just like societies constantly need new goals to avoid stagnation, but with all of the regulatory, tax, and affirmative action costs, they cannot afford to do that.

Instead they become rent-seekers, having built something great and now trying to extract as much money out of it as possible. Consequently they want you to pay them fifty bucks a month, however they have to justify it, so they can count on consistent profits and limit their size accordingly.

These are signs of a sick economy, and that usually means a sick society, since it has made crazy-stupid decisions to the point that it no longer operates as an economy but as a tax and rent-seeking cash cow.

All of that is extracted from the average wagie, which means that he pushes his employer to find ways to make more money in the world outside of his borders, at which point globalism — effectively created by unions driving labor offshore at the same time that democracy decided that with the Soviets out of the way, it might as well complete what it started in WW1 and take over the world — becomes a ruthless profit-seeking activity.

We saw this starting two decades ago when grocery stores began offering those little customer loyalty cards. If you got the card, you got better prices and enough coupons to keep you coming back.

As long as they got their $50 a month out of you, life was easy for them. Multiply that amount times their number of consumers times twelve and they know their baseline revenues, which enables them to keep hiring their friends and other bloat.

Software updates are another variation on this. They ship you “free” updates every month that eventually require you to upgrade your gadget because it cannot handle the bloat and waste of the new updates.

When margins overwhelm profit potential, everyone turns into a rent-seeker. “I have this title or ownership, therefore hand me things.”

Entropy wins at that point. No one can act to improve anything, and everyone forms a little hugbox dedicated to preserving the gimmedats of the status quo.

A civilization avoids this state by doing two things: first, it cuts external costs so that margins do not overwhelm profit potential, and second, it socializes mature products by granting monopolies that then cut staff.

If, for example, we decided that Microsoft Office 2019 was the best that an office suite could ever get and had no flaws, it would make sense to transfer it to another authority which would be five guys in an office with a monopoly and no interest in expanding it.

That would force Microsoft to find new fields to till, new mountains to climb, and new visions to dream instead of milking the past in a rent-seeking pattern that ends with everyone paying them a subscription fee just to enjoy normal tools.

We know that tech is grinding to a halt because it has invented nothing new for a long time. The grand visions of Google sputtered and died; Facebook has turned into Second Life; Twitter now seems like a good place to go get state propaganda but not much else.

This means that transition is on the wind. The old ways no longer work. Every time you see a service fee or update, console yourself with the knowledge that this is simply a grave being dug for worldwide democracy and the NWO.

Having a really bad day

daily picdump 36 3
A bad day.

“I wish I could buy property in China”

video 7MB

Diners today face an uncertain future.

In New York City, few original diners remain. However, the recent embracing of nostalgia — think, the rise in speakeasies — has also revitalized the typical American diner.

2022 04 08 15 36
American Diner.

A recent addition to New York’s Soho neighborhood is the trendy ’50s-style Soho Diner, part of the Soho Grand Hotel. Other New York diners, like the Waverly Diner and the Empire Diner, have managed to keep their doors open despite changing tastes.

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CIA tries to import insects that devistate crops

China inspects all packages. It’s a 100% full scan policy. This is because for decades, the United States has been busy introducing plagues, insects, and viruses to destroy China via destruction of it’s food base, and in any and all forms. This is known as “hybrid war”.

China has not retaliated…yet.

But if and when they do, the United States will collapse like the house of cards that it is.

This is typical, and apparently it’s a common enough event. Once discovered, the Chinese then send the packages on (minus the insects) and watch who gets the packages. Then the person just disappears after their mandatory interview with the PLA. video 3MB

Meanwhile in India

daily picdump 25 3
Meanwhile in India.

How Are Those Sanctions Working Out, Guys?

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Unfortunately, the sanctions the US put on Russia do not appear to be harming Russia at all, even as they are furthering the destruction of the economy of the West, and setting the stage for a collapse of the dollar as reserve currency.

Russia has just announced that if Europe wants its oil, they’re going to have to pay in rubles. This will heavily reenforce the ruble, of course. Presumably, it will make up for most or all of the damage that the sanctions have caused.

RT:

 Russia will now accept payment for gas exports to “unfriendly countries” in rubles only, President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with the government on Wednesday.

The president explained that Russia plans to abandon all “compromised” currencies in payment settlements. He added that illegitimate decisions by a number of Western countries to freeze Russia’s assets destroyed all confidence in their currencies.

“I have decided to implement in the shortest possible time a set of measures to change the payments for – yes let’s start with this – for our natural gas supplied to the so-called unfriendly countries in Russian rubles, that is to stop using all compromised currencies for transactions,” the Russian president said.

“It doesn’t make sense to deliver our goods to the EU and the US and get paid in dollars and euros,” he added. 

For those who don’t know the details: it is impossible for Europe to shut off Russian gas any time soon. They will literally freeze to death, or have to figure out some kind of wooden steam system.

People were saying Russian might just shut off the gas and let Europe deal with the situation, but this is much better.

The ruble bottomed out on March 7, and has been largely recovering. It’s only down 13% over the month of war.

If you consider that Russia is currently under the most severe economic sanctions in history by the most powerful economic entity in history – it’s not looking too bad.

That 13% isn’t going to affect anyone’s life in Russia, it only affects international trade. Not a big deal. No one in Russia is suffering from this, unless you consider being denied PornHub, Netflix, and McDonald’s as “suffering.”

This ultimatum to Europe will give it its 13% back.

Meanwhile, the Russian stock market, which was closed on the day of the incursion into the Ukraine, was reopened and is doing fine.

RT:

 Russia’s stocks continued to rise sharply on Thursday as the Moscow Exchange reopened for limited trading this week, after suspending most of its transactions on February 28.

The ruble-based MOEX benchmark went up more than 11% to 2,743 points. The dollar-denominated RTS index of leading Russian stocks was down slightly, to 888.59 points.

The Moscow Exchange resumed trading in 33 Russian equities, including shares of Gazprom, Sberbank, Aeroflot, and other domestic firms. Oil majors Rosneft and Lukoil were both up by 20% and 16%, respectively. Aluminum company Rusal rose more than 14%, while Norilsk Nickel jumped more than 22%. 

So, basically, the US operation against Russia has been like a situation where a guy breaks into your house and is waving around a gun at your family, then he goes ahead and puts the gun in his mouth and blows his own brains out. You’re going to have to clean the brains off the wall, and repair the locks on the door, but otherwise you’re going to be good. The intruder, however, is not so good. He’s just blown his own brains out.

This is all happening very quickly.

It’s hard to keep up with.

But the US has effectively committed a very public suicide in the name of a bizarre moral signaling campaign about how they are very good people and so oppose the very bad Russians.

It now looks to me as though this thing was planned over a very long period of time. Since the Maidan, Russia, presumably working with China, has set a trap for the United States in the Ukraine. They knew that after the revolution, the West wouldn’t be able to help itself, and would move NATO forces into the country, and NATOize the country, and so they planned the response – and understood the US response.

There had to be an invasion, because they had to get the US to act in this deranged way, which is the result of both unfathomable hubris and the general degrading of the culture into a state of nonstop moral panic.

The US has already lost.

Putin has demonstrated hypersonic missiles in the Ukraine. These cannot be shot down by any of NATO’s missile defense systems, meaning if NATO tries to attack Russia conventionally, Russia can strike targets across Western Europe. Moreover, there is just no way to invade Russia.

The only remaining options are to back off or start a nuclear war.

It is looking like they will do some kind of chemical attack false flag hoax in the Ukraine, but I don’t even understand what purpose that serves. The only people who will believe that are the “international Community,” which America is already dragging down to hell with them.

There are other theories. Alex Jones and others are saying that Western intelligence is planning to assassinate Joe Biden and blame Russia. That seems a bit outlandish, but I guess you never know. Still, I don’t really see what purpose that would serve. Russia can just say they didn’t do it. Then what changes?

The wheel is already turning.

The jig is up.

The Church – Under The Milky Way

Continuing with the 1990s theme, perhaps a reader or two might remember this little gem…

Meanwhile in America

daily picdump 50 3
The American way.

Rufus respects his flag

Inside of China. video 3MB

Rufus protects his sister

Family. Rufus. It’s all about a greater purpose. video 1MB

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.

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles 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.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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Global Sitrep with heavy Ukraine influence an update for 1MAR22

This is a sitrep for the Russian / Ukranian / Western collapse in coils as of early march 2022. It’s a bit all over the place. It includes fighting updates, control of the media narrative, pretty Chinese girls, jokes from Satan himself and hamburgers. Hamburgers too. Lots and lots, and lots of hamburgers. I hope that you will like it.

We start off with some food porn; the lovely hamburger.

In fact, I will go as far as to proudly state that this article has been brought to you by the lovely hamburger (Well, in this case a cheeseburger.) and I hope that you too end up appreciating the news with a flavor for excitement!

One of the residents of one of the new Republics.

This explains so much! Guy is from one of the new provences, the LDR or the NDR (not specified) that is joyous about Russia stopping the Ukrine shelling of their homes.

“Now I am constantly among the fighters. Many of my colleagues talk about the progress of the liberation of Donbass and Ukraine, so I focus on something else: I talk about the mood of our guys.

I don’t need to say that they are all on the upswing, their morale is high and they are ready to carry out the tasks assigned to them. What is important is that none of them has any bitterness or desire to fight for the sake of war.

For everyone, this battle is a battle for freedom. There are many, many young men in the ranks today from among those who have a home in the territories yet to be liberated. Can this be an invasion? It’s a homecoming, as they themselves say.

There are many volunteers who come without summons, at the call of the heart. And regardless of age, civilian occupation, place of residence – they are all united by the desire to liberate the Republic and Ukraine from Nazism.

This is not a war for the sake of war, this is a war in the name of peace, and the civilians of Ukraine are not enemies to these guys.”

Comic of the year!

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1646066453854

American “news”

Heh. Heh.

"Want some comedy? Go take a look at the front page of the Drudge Report. I’ve never seen such mass propaganda in my life. How do they possibly retain a shred of creditability on anything after this. The desperation reeks."

Yeah. The American “news” is all full about the mistake Russia made and how it is now in a disastrous quagmire. Oh No! Here’s the top, highest promoted links on the Drudge Report today. Nothing is balanced. Nothing is accurate. Nothing is a view about the entire situation. It’s all emotionally driven bullshit…

LIONHEART ZELENSKY...
Yeah. The proud, brave man who is taking on Russia all by himself.
'I NEED AMMO'...
Oh. Right. So the reason behind the Russian incursion is to disarm the Ukraine. And that is what the West does not want at all. They want an armed Ukraine, and a long quagmire.
UKRAINIANS RALLY TO DEFEND...
Brave Ukrainians ready to die for their homeland. Actually, the truth is more like Russia stepping in and stabilizing a very unstable place. Anyone who lays down weapons can continue their lives, and return to their roles once the situation stabilizes.
RUSSIAN MEDIA STRUGGLE TO BOLSTER LIES...
Cut out all alternative viewpoints. Subject the Western readership to a cardboard paper cutout; evil villain. 
4,300 dead, 146 tanks smashed...
Massive losses on Russia! What a mistake that Russia made!
Fuel, logistics problems frustrate advance...
What a mistake! It's identical to the "Battle of the Bulge" where the proud Americans won against the evil Nazi Germans.
Soldiers Were Told They Were Going to Drill?
Putin lied to his soldiers. See! You just cannot trust a communist.
Forces attack children's hospital...
Killing and maiming little children! The Russian monster!
Radioactive Waste Facility Struck By Missile...
Oh no! Nuclear war is any minute now!
Kyiv skies glow orange...
Fighting in Kiev right now, and the proud defenders are holding on, but just barely. They need NATO intervention.
Bloody fighting erupts on streets of 2nd largest city Kharkiv...
Fighting in Kharkiv right now, and the proud defenders are holding on, but just barely. They need NATO intervention.
368,000 flee...
Putin started a humaritarian crisis.
Navy seizes 2 boats as war goes to seas...
Russia has taken over two Naval vessels. The NATO alliance needs to sail to the coast and get involved!
CYBER ATTACK HITS KREMLIN...
The West fights back using high-technology abilities that the RUssians have no defense against.
Moscow central bank urges calm amid cash run fears...
Russians are freaking out, and the entire financial well-being of Russia is about to collapse any day now.
Inside the anguished flight from Ukraine as women, children search for safety
Yes. Women and children and displaced people. Yes. It's horrible.
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, claims victory against Russia
Brave fighters holding off those dasterdly Communists!

But the truth remains the same; the louder the shrilling, the more obvious the defeat of Western forces is.  Indeed. The more vicious the propaganda gets, the more likely it is that NATO is loosing badly on the ground. Popcorn time.

While in the United States

Yah. It’s a completely different reality. Far removed. Living life. Just bombing the rest of the world to pieces and provoking wars left and right. But in the meantime, just enjoying life. video 4MB

For youse newcomers to MM…

I sprinkle content all over the place. You have to see the big picture, and realize that everythign is connected. When you see the big picture, and break up content MM style, you disable the vault 7 influences imbedded inside of all Western electronic media. Your mind adapts quicker than the vault 7 influence.

Additionally, it serves as an easy check to see if someone ACTUALLY read the article. Hit and run commenters don’t. And if you read the articles, and not comment on the food, pretty girls, or side ventures, then I know that you haven’t read the article. Like this joker…

2022 03 01 16 24
2022 03 01 16 24

Pretty Chinese girl

Let’s lighten up the mood here. video 1MB

Falsehoods in wartime

Historian Anne Morelli has summarized Arthur Ponsonby’s classic book Falsehood in War-Time as this:

  1. We do not want war.
  2. The opposite party alone is guilty of war.
  3. The enemy is inherently evil and resembles the devil.
  4. We defend a noble cause, not our own interests.
  5. The enemy commits atrocities on purpose; our mishaps are involuntary.
  6. The enemy uses forbidden weapons.
  7. We suffer small losses, those of the enemy are enormous.
  8. Recognized artists and intellectuals back our cause.
  9. Our cause is sacred.
  10. All who doubt our propaganda are traitors.

Ah. Isn’t that exactly what you are watching on any of the American, Western, UK and Australian “news” media?

Another cute Chinese girl

Here is a fine lady who is caught in the rain without an umbrella. Oh snap! video 3MB

The Situation in the Ukraine: Predictions vs. Reality

By Dmitry Orlov and posted with the author’s permission. 

Last Thursday I reposed my “top ten signs that Russia has invaded the Ukraine” from 8 years ago when the Ukrainian regime change and civil war first started and the West continuously made claims that Russia had invaded. Well, last Thursday Russia did indeed invade.

Russia had the full legal right to invade the Ukraine from several perspectives: to defend its allies in Donetsk and Lugansk;

  • to defend itself against Ukrainian WMDs, which the Ukrainian president threatened to start producing at the Munich Security Conference;
  • and to stop NATO from continuing its advance toward Russian borders in violation of its previous commitment of “not an inch to the east.”

Russia exercised its right of self-defense under article 51 of part 7 of the UN Charter.

  • The Ukraine had forfeited its right to territorial integrity under the 1970 UN Declaration by refusing to honor the rights of its Russian-speaking population.
  • It also refused to renew its Friendship Treaty with Russia and therefore no longer had a defined border with Russia that Russia was obligated to honor.

From a strictly legalistic perspective, claims that “Russia violated the Ukraine’s territorial integrity” or that this is “an act of Russian aggression” is just pure twaddle.

From a moral perspective, the fact that the entire international community idly stood by and ineffectually discussed politics for eight years during which the civilian population of Donetsk and Lugansk was continuously shelled by the Ukrainian “anti-terrorist operation” is utterly shameful.

Shameful.

People who are now speaking out against Russia’s military action in the Ukraine need to answer a simple question: Where have you been for the last eight years while [1] the carnage in Donetsk and Lugansk was going on, while [2] people were being burned alive in Odessa, [3] while the Ukrainian government organized terrorist operations on Russian territory and [4] while the entire Ukrainian population has been forced to kowtow to Americans and to speak Ukrainian, most often against its will?

If your answer is “I didn’t know” then you have forfeited your right to an informed opinion on what’s happening there now. Please keep that in mind and act accordingly.

Now I will go through the 10 predictions I made 8 years ago and see how well they held up in light of events that have unfolded for the past three days.

A reasonable expectation would be that I got them completely wrong; if not, then that’s something of a minor miracle. Please keep that in mind also.

1. Ukrainian artillery fell silent almost immediately. They are no  longer shelling residential districts of Donetsk and Lugansk. This is  because their locations had been pinpointed prior to the operation, and  by Thursday afternoon they were completely wiped out using air attacks,  artillery and ground-based rocket fire, as the first order of business.  Local residents are overjoyed that their horrible ordeal is finally at  an end.

Not quite true. Donetsk and Lugansk is still being shelled sporadically, although most of the firing has been suppressed and as more and more territory is being liberated from the Ukrainian forces by the Donbass militia (with Russian forces playing a supporting role). At the same time, new possibilities for civilian carnage are resulting from the fact that the Ukraine’s Nazi battalions, under guidance from their US/NATO minders, are hiding heavy weapons in residential districts and using civilians as human shields.

2. The look of military activity on the ground in  Donetsk and Lugansk has changed dramatically. Whereas before it involved  small groups of resistance fighters, the Russians operate in battalions  of 400 men and dozens of armored vehicles, followed by convoys of  support vehicles (tanker trucks, communications, field kitchens, field  hospitals and so on). The flow of vehicles in and out is non-stop,  plainly visible on air reconnaissance and satellite photos. Add to that  the relentless radio chatter, all in Russian, which anyone who wants to  can intercept, and the operation becomes impossible to hide.

This is obviously the case. No sane person would now say that there are no Russian forces in the Ukraine. They made their presence about as obvious as they possibly could and the sight of endless columns of Russian military vehicles rolling unhindered through the Ukrainian countryside appears to be effecting a sea change in the mindset of the Ukraine’s population. Throughout history, it has always been quick to switch allegiances as circumstances and battle lines shifted, and this time will probably be no exception.

3. The Ukrainian military has promptly vanished. Soldiers and officers  alike have taken off their uniforms, abandoned their weapons, and are  doing their best to blend in with the locals. Nobody thought the odds of  the Ukrainian army against the Russians were any good. Ukraine’s only  military victory against Russia was at the battle of Konotop in 1659,  but at the time Ukraine was allied with the mighty Khanate of Crimea,  and, you may have noticed, Crimea is not on Ukraine’s side this time  around.

Again, not entirely true. It turns out that there is a hardened Nazi embedded with each and every detachment of Ukrainian forces whose job is to shoot those who try to surrender. Nevertheless, some unknown number of Ukrainian soldiers have surrendered, signed a promise to no longer fight against the Russian army, and have been given some food and sent home. In all, the Ukrainian military is turning out to be no different from other NATO-organized, NATO-trained forces, be they in Afghanistan, Georgia, Iraq or elsewhere. All of them immediately turn out to be completely useless as soon as a real military force arrives on the scene, be it the Russians, the Taliban or the Islamic Caliphate. Also notable is the fact that the large quantities of weapons recently supplied to the Ukraine by the US have been shown to be completely useless. The Javelin anti-tank missiles, which helped line the pockets of some of the Pentagon’s top brass, have been worse than useless: by the time they can be set up to fire there is generally nobody left alive to fire them, so the soldiers don’t even bother with them.

4. There are Russian checkpoints everywhere. Local  civilians are allowed through, but anyone associated with a government,  foreign or domestic, is detained for questioning. A filtration system  has been set up to return demobilized Ukrainian army draftees to their  native regions, while the volunteers and the officers are shunted to  pretrial detention centers, to determine whether they had ordered war  crimes to be committed.

Not true at all. The Russian troops are not engaging with the civilians in any way, scrupulously avoiding residential districts and doing their best to see that the delivery of electricity, water and other essentials is not disrupted. As far as denazification, I am still not sure what the plan is, but my hunch at the moment is that this will be left up to the Ukrainians themselves. There is a good chance that once they realize what the Nazis and their Western masters have been doing to their country, they will do their best to round up the Nazis and hang them on streetlights. The Nazis will see this coming (some already do) and will run away to Poland or Slovenia or points further west.

5. Most of Ukraine’s border crossings  are by now under Russian control. Some have been reinforced with air  defense and artillery systems and tank battalions, to dissuade NATO  forces from attempting to stage an invasion. Civilians and humanitarian  goods are allowed through. Businessmen are allowed through once they  fill out the required forms (which are in Russian).

The Ukrainian border guards along the Russian border have abandoned their posts. Some of them walked over to the Russian side and surrendered. The Russian and Belorussian borders are under control from the Russian and Belorussian sides. The western border crossings are crowded from all the people flying to flee.

6. Russia  has imposed a no-fly zone over all of Ukraine. All civilian flights have  been cancelled. There is quite a crowd of US State Department staffers,  CIA and Mossad agents, and Western NGO people stuck at Borispol airport  in Kiev. Some are nervously calling everyone they know on their  satellite phones. Western politicians are demanding that they be  evacuated immediately, but Russian authorities want to hold onto them  until their possible complicity in war crimes has been determined.

Flight radar shows zero flights over all of the Ukraine. In fact, air traffic has been disrupted over much of Europe, with many airspaces closed and lots of new restrictions on traffic. Many vacationers, especially those from the Ukraine, are stuck wherever they are. The ones in Egypt are lucky: the Egyptian government is paying for their hotel stays while they are stuck there. The Westerners, on the other hand, having learned their lesson from the fiasco in Afghanistan, fled the Ukraine ahead of time. Since there is a long list of places for them to get the hell out of before their luck runs out, it’s good that they are getting the knack of it.

7. The usual Ukrainian talking heads, such as president Poroshenko, PM  Yatsenyuk and others, are no longer available to be interviewed by  Western media. Nobody quite knows where they are. There are rumors that  they have already fled the country. Crowds have stormed their abandoned  residences, and were amazed to discover that they were all outfitted  with solid gold toilets. Nor are the Ukrainian oligarchs anywhere to be  found, except for the warlord Igor Kolomoisky, who was found in his  residence, abandoned by his henchmen, dead from a heart attack.  (Contributed by the Saker.)

The number one Ukrainian talking head, the president-cum-comedian Zelensky, is hiding in a bunker in Lvov, Führer-like, surrounded by his Nazi henchmen. His jumbled missives to the faithful appear to have been prerecorded. At the same time, the information war is proceeding apace, with numerous new fake news items arriving daily, too many to keep track of. The real fun will start when the TV channels in Kiev get denazified and Ukrainians stir from their eight-year stupor, figure a few things out for themselves and become extremely angry at those who have been lying to them for eight long years.

8. Some of the over 800,000 Ukrainian refugees are starting to stream back in from Russia. They were  living in tent cities, many of them in the nearby Rostov region, but with the winter coming they are eager to get back home, now that the shelling is over. Along with them, construction crews, cement trucks and  flatbeds stacked with pipe, cable and rebar are streaming in, to repair  the damage from the shelling.

This is yet to start happening. It will be a slow process, given that the number of refugees now, eight years later, is in the millions and scattered over numerous Russian regions.

9. There is all sorts of intense diplomatic and military activity around the world, especially in Europe  and the US. Military forces are on highest alert, diplomats are jetting around and holding conferences. President Obama just held a press  conference to announce that “We don’t have a strategy on Ukraine yet.” His military advisers tell him that his usual strategy of “bomb a little  and see what happens” is not likely to be helpful in this instance.

This is definitely the case. The goal for Western leaders now is to look purposeful and strong while doing nothing of consequence. They keep talking about cutting Russia off from SWIFT bank messaging system, but keep recoiling in horror when they realize what they will mean for their energy prices (which are already dangerously high). The Russian posture vis-à-vis Western sanctions seems to be “Bring them on; we are ready!” Apparently, eight years have been enough for Russia to thoroughly prepare for this event.

10. Kiev has surrendered. There are Russian tanks on the Maidan Square. Russian infantry is mopping up the remains of Ukraine’s National Guard. A curfew has indeed been imposed. The operation to take Kiev resembled “Shock and Awe” in Baghdad: a few loud bangs and then a whimper.

Russian tanks are unlikely to enter the city center; they are concentrated on destroying military installations, demobilizing the Ukrainian military and destroying the Nazi battalions. There is indeed a curfew in effect in Kiev.

One more significant development worth mentioning: Russian forces are taking charge of the Ukraine’s nuclear installations, including the one at Chernobyl, which is now under joint Russian/Ukrainian control. This will reduce the chance that the Ukrainian Nazis will try to blow up one of them on their merry way to hell. The Ukraine has 15 nuclear reactors, and since it is virtually out of other sources of energy it has been running all of them flat out. Two of them went off-line recently because of technical issues. Russia is working very hard to make Chernobyl 2.0 less of a possibility.

I am not sure what grade I should give myself for my predictions. Russia’s political and military planners have turned out to be quite a bit smarter than me, but this is not at all a surprise. After all, they have all of the intellectual resources of a huge, powerful country whereas I am just a guy with an office chair and a laptop.

Do I care to make some more predictions about the Ukraine?

Sure, why not!

1. Donetsk and Lugansk regions will continue on their path of closer and closer integration into the Russian Federation. They are already part of the Russian currency space, their educational systems are integrated with Russia’s (same standards and procedures), their defense systems are fully integrated and diplomatically they act as a well-synchronized unit.

2. An area further west, probably encompassing the entire basin of Dnieper River and the Black Sea littoral, from the Belorussian to the Romanian border, will be part of a Russian zone. The regions within this zone will be given political autonomy within a general security and economic framework linked to Russia. The rough outlines of this area can be determined from the following language map. The areas in red and orange—is Russian-speaking and is naturally part of the Russian zone. The only two exceptions will be a Carpatho-Russian enclave (in purple) which will need to be administered separately and a Hungarian enclave (in green) that might as well be absorbed into Hungary.

3. Further west will lie a zone that will be wrapped in fancy paper with ribbons and bows and presented as an extra-special present to the EU to love to cherish and to suffer migraines and aneurisms over. Roughly speaking, the yellow area is Ukrainian-speaking and is an all-you-can-eat (please don’t choke) buffet for the West. It has relatively poor soil and high incidence of iodine deficiency and imbecility in the general population. It is also where Ukrainian nationalism comes from and where the current Ukrainian Nazi plague originated. The Russian stance should be (if I may be so bold as to recommend what the Russian government should do) along the lines of “If you like your Ukrainian Nazis, you can have your Ukrainian Nazis.”

Why the Chinese system works

Here we have a son who has a mental issue. He left home 11 years ago. But in China, everyone is monitored, and it is the duty, the requirement; the responsibility of each local govenrment to know who is in their jurisdiction. So they found this young man. And they used AI to find out who he was, and contacted his family. In this video, the mother and his sister comes to get him and take him home. It is not right for him to live hand-to-mouth on the streets alone.

video 13MB

Some meals of desperation

Sigh. Life happens.

Life is too short not to eat well.

I argue that it is better to drive a distressed automobile but eat extraordinarily well, than you drive a nice car and live off fast food. And you can take that opinion of mine “to the bank“.

Love her belly

I like this girl’s belly. It is appealing. Like a milkshake. video 5MB

Taiwan Leadership argues for a change in alliances

Well, it is obvious to us here, but hidden from the rest of the world. The United States does not care about you or your country, and will abandon you and leave to to rot if it is to their advantage.

Well, it looks like people in Taiwan are watching the events and wondering “what about us”?

Former Taiwan Vice President from the pro Independence Party 民进党 (The people progressive party) openly criticized her own party and current president.  She now promotes discarding alignment with America, and a military buildup. She now is endorsing reunification with China. Wow.
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Use Google to translate.
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Look at the bright side…

For those of you that are worried about all the changes and the onslaught of “news” about this or that, keep in mind what Satan thinks…

Do good works

It doesn’t take much. Just try to add something to your environment. Generate good thoughts. Over time, you will see a big difference.

video

The USA accounted for 81% of all global conflicts

This is obvious to me, but not so for the rest of the world.

‘Never forget the real threat to world’: Amid Ukraine crisis, the Chinese embassy in Russia slams the United States. Among the 248 Armed conflicts that occurred in 153 regions across the world from 1945 to 2001, 201 were initiated by the US, accounting for 81% of the total number.

https://www.firstpost.com/world/never-forget-real-threat-to-world-amid-ukraine-crisis-chinese-embassy-in-russia-slams-us-10413011.html

Be the Rufus

It’s all about community. Participate. Make the world a better place. Be like the Chinese. video 6MB

Austrian Minister of Defence, Klaudier Tanner

According to SD, this might be the person who would launch World War III. Whether it is soon, or far off. This is the face of the person to initiated the nuclear conflagration.

Austrian Minister of Defense, Klaudier Tanner.

Satan has some advice to Americans / EU

Taxi Driver gives a ride for free

He’s a true Rufus. He sees a young girl carrying a baby all alone,a nd stope and gives them a free ride. What a Rufus! video 6MB

Now, let’s talk hamburgers.

This piece of work really speaks to me. You know…

Hamburgers for all.

What do the Chinese think?

Maybe a tiny percentage of netizens are very interested in the situation in Ukraine, following it constantly, but I’d say majority (95%, I guess ?) of Chinese just get on with their life and feel grateful that they can live in a contry where NATO/US & its 5-eyes allies can not come and bomb it.

MSM/some people keep on posting this or that about Chinese/China’s stands on the on-going situation between Russia and Ukraine, it sometimes seems to me like a part of the Western psyop to drive a wedge between Russia and China and their supporters/sympathisers.

-Lulu

Russian SWIFT cutoff

According to the Russian National SWIFT Association, Russia has the second-largest number of users after the US, with some 300 Russian financial institutions in the system, more than half of Russia’s financial institutions.
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This is not the first time US, EU banned Russia from SWIFT. So Putin is not caught by surprise.
Russia is the world second largest exporter of resources, so, by imposing sanction on Russia from using SWIFT (yet again), it will force the world hungry for Russian resources to trade through China in RMB.
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Only this time, the Chinese RMB international transaction system is established and ready to welcome the world with confidence.
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As a result, we can expect the continue rising in value of rmb, this will attract more and more investors using rmb as reserve currency, and will speed up the replacement of US dollar to rmb worldwide.
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There is always good reason behind an inevitable empire collapsed:
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US regimes are basically run by elderly who born in the 1930s and 40s, these are out of touch extreme supremacists. They are self centred, know no consequences, one leg already in the coffin; truly ugly, old folks. Their stupidly and aggression will send their country into poverty, backwardness, and disintegration. Well, it already has, but so far the decay has been hidden from prublic view.
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As the Chinese word 危机 (crisis) suggests; 危 is for danger, and 机 is for opportunity.
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So each time the West creates a crisis for China and others, China will identify the opportunities to turn the crisis into opportunity and make herself stronger.
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Each time, US and Europe push and promote aggression against China, they are actually helping to create an enemy that they cannot defeat.
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Welcome to the coming new world order with more fairness, equality, and freedom from the nasty; nasty American-lead unipolar global dictatorship.

China’s Xinghua News journalist reporting from Ukraine and Belarus

– Journalist at Gomel, Belarus says the safety measure for the negotionation place is extreme high. Police does not journalist to get close the place where negotiation to take place: https://www.bilibili.com/video/av296979724?from=search&seid=13039214469606151791&spm_id_from=333.337.0.0;

– The Russian delegation says they didn’t sleep the whole night while waiting for the arriaval fo the Ukrainian delegation, which delayed/changed due to their logistical issues: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Xu411D777?spm_id_from=333.999.0.0;

– Feb. 28th around 8: 30 local time, the same Chinese businessman of yesterday’s vido I posted, who lives in Kiev suburb, tells Xinhua News that the suburb of Kiev is quiet. It’s safe to stay at home. He also says there’s only one TV channel in Ukraine right now only reporting the war: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Ea411h7GX?spm_id_from=333.999.0.0;

He also says bread and water at supermarket are basically gone, lots of empty shelves, and restrict to 2500 Ukrainian hryvnia per purchase: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1ga411h7B1?spm_id_from=333.999.0.0.

Hope these videos from Xinhua News give your guy some extra inform that differs from Western MSM’s perspectives.

And also speaking about hamburgers…

I think that all this is making me hungry, but you know… as they say at Burger King, “It takes two hands to handle a whopper”!

He’s got two huge burgers.

Other actions by the United States

Here’s some article in my morning feed. Obviously part of the mighty propaganda machine, just a churning things out left and right and my opinions…

U.S. To Expel 12 Russian Diplomats At UN

Is it even possible? The USA does not run the UN.

Ukraine Seeks To Join EU As Round Of Talks With Russia Ends

If it cannot join NATO then it will try to join the EU. Man will that destory the EU financially. Whoa!

Ruble Dives, Stocks Sink As West Tightens Russia Sanctions

It's all "play money". Don't be so sure about things in global economics. It's an entirely new "ball game".

Russian porn stars banned from OnlyFans amid invasion of Ukraine

The horror!

Biden updates nuclear explosion guidelines to include SOCIAL DISTANCING as Putin readies missiles

It's progressive, don't you know.

US closes embassy in Belarus and threatens more sanctions if it joins Russian invasion of Ukraine

The USA "color revolution" failed.  So the USA now treats Belarus as a Russian state.

Six American special ops veterans join the fight in Ukraine

Many Americans can't wait to kill those pesky commies!

Dan Murphy’s and BWS to pull all Russian vodka from shelves in opposition to invasion of Ukraine

'Merica!

Remember what America has become

No, it is not the image of a “great and wonderful white shinging building on the hill”, but rather a corrupt, third world nation that is falling down into black hole of decay and internal rot at all levels. video 51MB

Why I think that America has been taken over by Satan…

Think Hamburgers

This lass certainly does.

I thought we were reasonably free of Trump and I ignore most of his utterings. But this one – it got to me.

TRUMP: “Under Bush, Russia invaded Georgia. Under Obama, Russia took Crimea. Under Biden, Russia invaded Ukraine.”

“I stand as the only president of the twenty-first century on who’s watch Russia did not invade another country.”

America’s brutalist belief system

No wonder, the bully still thinks it’s 20 years old, muscular and tough. When instead, it’s an old seniale man, with a walker. video 3MB

From the attack dogs’ own mouths—how stupid can these people be?

Why I think that America has been taken over by Satan…

Here’s rifle training in middle school. I wonder what the American school kids learn in schools today. video 3MB

Yeah. Trolls hate me putting up pictures of pretty ladies. Oh, boy oh boy! Do they hate it. It drives them bonker-crazy! But no one has yet to complain about my love for hamburgers.

Here we have a vintage lass hold a fine burger in her hands. Now, what’s wrong about that? Whoops! Mind the nipple flash. I think that it must be a “wardrobe malfunction”.

At the operational level there have been mistakes such as about convoys undefended. At the strategic level things are very much on track. Russian procedure on clearing towns is excellent and was used extensively in Syria.

Step 1 approach the town and assess the chance of their surrender
Step 2 surround the town, cutting off resupply.
Step 3 based on initial recon begin with very targeted strikes weakening defenses
Step 4 send in probes to gain a clearer picture of internal defenses
Step 5 begin degrading them
Step 6 open humanitarian corridors
Step 7 begin probing attacks from different sides 24/7 to disturb and confuse and sleep deprive (your troops can rest)
Step 8 when defenses are sufficiently weakened invade

Chinese Term ‘Wuxin Gongzuo’: Can’t Focus on Work Due to Russia-Ukraine Crisis

Chinese netizens are so focused on the Russian attack on Ukraine that nobody can focus on work (wuxin gongzuo).  From HERE.

2022 03 01 15 20
2022 03 01 15 20

A comment

The Grand Chessboard reveals all. 

The purpose of NATO is... 

keep Germany down in Europe, 
keep the USA in control of Europe, 
keep the Russians out. 

With the combined factors of; 

Russia’s rise and dedollarise; 
China’s rise militarily and economically; 
Germany’s pending approval of NS2 to increase Germany’s economic strength; Germany being the dominant economy and country in EU; 

America had to find a way to scare EU and tighten America’s stranglehold on the EU. 

What better way than to provoke a war in a part of Europe not exactly vital to EU? 

Ukraine is going exactly to plan: it’s a win win for USA and Russia. 

Russia knows its LNG sales to other countries, like Japan, will not be targeted. Can you imagine what will happen to Japan if LNG from Sakhalin is removed? The depressive effects will spark a global depression. 

You can bet China is studying this Ukraine conflict very intently. 

We have reached an inflection point. 

The world will shift to a path different from the hegemon’s choosing. Whatever deity you choose to praise, do thank him/her for your salvation.

-Grune

Pretty girl

Here’s one of the popular girls on Douxing in China. She’s impressive. video 3MB

How about some hamburgers?

While all sorts of crazy stuff is going on in the United States, the rest of the world is fine and following plans. So don’t get too worked up about it. how about enjoying a fine hamburger instead.

Elon Musk deploys SpaceX’s Starlink Internet satellites over Ukraine after request from vice PM | Euronews

There seems to be an obvious connection between the United States military / government and Elon Musk. From the attack on the Chinese Space Station to this, it’s obviously suspicious.

https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/02/27/elon-musk-deploys-spacex-s-starlink-internet-satellites-over-ukraine-after-request-from-vi

Here she is again.

Nice view. She’s a strutting down the street don’t you know. video 3MB

Oh, and don’t forget about the fries!

Sheech! I am so accustomed about eating hamburgers with french fries that I forgot how to eat a burger without them. Usually, I try to substitute potato chips, or potato salad instead.

Americans, Brits and Europeans should stop clapping with glee…

This is the latest comment from Aaron Hawkins (Storm Clouds Gathering):

“ As this war heats up you will see many cheering for one flag or the other; promoting escalations and retaliations. This is a trap. 

Who exactly benefits from a major war that sends millions of young, fighting age men and women to slaughter each other in Eurasia (at the precise moment when civil disobedience with teeth was beginning to spread)? 

And what do you suppose is about to happen to the monetary system now that Russia is being cut from SWIFT? 

Did you consider the fact that not only does Europe depend heavily on Russian gas (that the U.S. cannot even come close to replacing), but Russia and Ukraine also happen to be the world’s two largest wheat exporters comprising approximately 30% of global production? 

All of Ukraine’s exports have been halted, and with Russia cut off from the western banking system all future customers will have to work outside the dollar. 

Even if the physical war were to be contained to Ukraine (spoiler alert: it won’t), the consequences of the cyber and economic warfare already underway will be devastating. Western leaders are setting their populations up for much more than just parabolic price increases. Widespread shortages and famine are on the horizon. This will not be a short term phenomenon."

Five days into the war and the first inkling of truth is presented to Americans

Video 15MB. Well worth the watch.

2022 03 01 15 33
2022 03 01 15 33

Alex Rubinstein tweets,

Watch Yevhen Karas the leader of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi terror gang C14’s speech from Kiev earlier this month. Straight from the horses’ mouth, he dispels the many narratives pushed by the Western governments, the mainstream media and the State Department.
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He claims:
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  • – Ukraine is being armed as pawns of the West because “we have fun killing”
  • – “We have started a war”
  • – “We have the most Javelins on the European continent”
  • – The European family has already collapsed
  • – Maidan would’ve been a “gay parade” if not for Nazi influence

America is pushing all this warfare

Keep in mind the ugly face of what he Hell that everyone is dealing with right now. The United States is NOT a happy, safe, and healthy nation right now. video 3MB

Now that’s a serious whopper!

Wow!

Great Video Speech regarding Ukraine & Russia 2014

Well, worth the watch. I watched it, was going to record it, and then Boom! No longer available in my region. Sigh! I urge everyone to watch it.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZSeTGq816/

Playing the mighty Wurlitzer vs Reality

By Chris Faure

Do people seriously imagine Russia simply blundered into the Ukraine not knowing what the west would do?

You may be surprised to hear that the world is actually still spinning.  All we have to deal with is the mighty Wurlitzer which is an old-style pipe organ for theaters, and also a propaganda instrument.

Allow me a moment to explain:

In 1967 the magazine Ramparts ran an exposé revealing that the Central Intelligence Agency had been secretly funding and managing a wide range of citizen front groups intended to counter communist influence around the world. 

In addition to embarrassing prominent individuals caught up, wittingly or unwittingly, in the secret superpower struggle for hearts and minds, the revelations of 1967 were one of the worst operational disasters in the history of American intelligence and presaged a series of public scandals from which the CIA’s reputation has arguably never recovered.

CIA official Frank Wisner called the operation his “mighty Wurlitzer,” on which he could play any propaganda tune.   

Hugh Wilford provides the first comprehensive account of the clandestine relationship between the CIA and its front organizations. 

Using an unprecedented wealth of sources, he traces the rise and fall of America’s Cold War front network from its origins in the 1940s to its Third World expansion during the 1950s and ultimate collapse in the 1960s.

Covering the intelligence officers who masterminded the CIA’s fronts as well as the involved citizen groups—émigrés, labor, intellectuals, artists, students, women, Catholics, African Americans, and journalists—Wilford provides a surprising analysis of Cold War society that contains valuable lessons for our own age of global conflict.

Now, the Mighty Wurlitzer, exposed during the cold war, has never ended.

We see it in full swing now.

Here are a few snippets, a few items from memory (it has to be from memory as most of the Russian sites are still down, or up or down, in a relentless cyber propaganda war and this cannot be meticulously linked to source).

And you know what, the Ukraine inherited its own theater and mighty Wurlitzer, where they are designing and producing for the common man, theater productions for this current time.

Excepting now, it is all done in studio with breathless journalists playing war and running around in front of green screens.

So, while the tinny and discordant theater music sometimes drowns out even our own ability to think (it is torture, you know!) let’s look at a few realities.

Sanctions.  Big Big Headlines – Russia is sanctioned for this or that and for basically everything, even Vodka.  The latest is SWIFT (but only for a few banks).  Take a good look at the sanctions.  It is paper production for the purpose of paper production.  The German sanctions on Russian banks for example have fine print.  (They all have).  They’re sanctioning Russia from hell, but of course, this does not apply to gas or oil payments.  Those will continue, says the fine print.

Sanctions on Russia are now the latest fashion accessory.  The one that can play that Wurlitzer the loudest is the one who wins.  So what happens if they don’t win?  What happens if they are busy shooting themselves in the heart, and not even in the foot?.  What happens if the fervor to punish Russia simply accelerates their own demise?

Russia is decoupling as fast as what the West is sanctioning.  A headline that comes to mind is: “European Commission: The disconnection of a number of banks from SWIFT “will actually block Russian exports and imports”.

No Einstein, it will hasten de-dollarization.

How about a plate of double cheeseburgers?

I could easily eat all of them up. WHat they do need is a fine strawberry milkshake, don’t you know.

Chinese girl

Let’s take a look at this fine Chinese lass. Here she is inside of her house. I’ll bet she is fun to be with. video 1MB

America’s Anti-Russian “news”…

This morning from Medvedev:

‘Final review’ of Russia’s relations with West now possible – former president

Dmitry Medvedev has dubbed European organizations “meaningless almshouses”.
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Western sanctions could be an “excellent reason for a final review” of Russia’s relations with the nations that have imposed the restrictions, the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council and former president, Dmitry Medvedev, said on Saturday.

Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, which was launched on February 24, has prompted outrage in the West and a new wave of harsh sanctions against Russia. In a lengthy post on the Russian social network VK, Medvedev called the restrictions “a myth, a figment, a figure of speech.”

Sanctions could be an excellent reason for the final review of all relations with those states that have introduced them. Including interruption of the dialogue on strategic stability,” Medvedev wrote.

[sidebar] Take another look at that sentence – why now? It is because most of the western world do not have answers to Russia on strategic stability, so they decided to play that Wurlitzer pretty loud to attempt to hide their inability). 

He added that in principle, it is possible “to renounce everything,” including the New START Treaty.

Yes, and diplomatic relations, in principle, are not particularly needed. It’s time to close the embassies with barn locks. And to continue contacts by examining each other only through binoculars and weapons’ optical systems,” Medvedev said.

Commenting on the decision by the Council of Europe and Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to suspend Russia’s membership, the former president said that while this is a “flagrant injustice,” it could still be considered as a good reason “to finally slam the door and forget about these meaningless almshouses forever.”

This development could also be used to “restore a number of important institutions for prevention of especially serious crimes in the country,” he said, such as the “death penalty for the most dangerous criminals, which, by the way, is being actively used in the United States and China.

He has no assets abroad and to the UK sanctions against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote:

Neither Putin, nor Lavrov have accounts neither in Britain nor anywhere abroad. Maybe the kingdom’s government got something frozen off rather than it froze something?”

We are in a new world.

A few more:

Russia has just suspended cooperation with NASA on the international space station .. including the launch team which will not be available to the US.  Russia will work with China.

Zap!

Are there any US astronauts there at the moment?  I don’t know, but Elon Musk will have to get them home.

Let’s take a look at few more of Mr Putin’s actions these last days.

Russia’s President Meeting (http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67851) with Security Council permanent members

💬 Vladimir Putin: According to available information, and this is confirmed by objective monitoring – we are seeing this; Banderites and neo-Nazis are putting up heavy weapons, including MLRS, right in the central districts of large cities, including Kiev and Kharkov. They plan to force return fire by Russian strike systems vs residential quarters. They are acting in the same way terrorists act all over the world – using people as shields.

It is known for a fact that all this is being done on the recommendations of foreign consultants, primarily American advisors.

❗️ Once again, I am appealing to the military of the armed forces of Ukraine. Do not allow neo-Nazis and Banderites to use your children, wives and elders as a live shield. Take power into your own hands. It seems it will be easier for us to come to terms with you than with this gang of drug addicts & neo-Nazis that have settled in Kiev and that have taken the Ukrainian people.

President Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation (https://is.gd/m8pf2L) with President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev.

The Presidents discussed developments related to the special military operation designed to protect peaceful civilians in Donbass as well as Ukraine’s demilitarisation and denazification.

☝️ Shavkat Mirziyoyev expressed understanding of Russia’s actions.

The Presidents also touched upon certain current issues on the bilateral agenda. They reaffirmed their shared intention to continue the development of the Russian-Uzbek strategic partnership with a focus on implementing specific trade, economic, and humanitarian projects.

President Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation (https://is.gd/322XIF) with President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping.

The President of Russia gave the President of China a detailed account of the reasons behind the recognition of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic and the start of a special military operation to protect civilians from genocide and ensure the demilitarisation and denazification of the Ukrainian state. Vladimir Putin also noted that considering the signals received from Kiev he was ready to send a delegation to Minsk to hold talks with representatives of Ukraine.

☝️ Xi Jinping stressed that he respected the actions of the Russian leadership in the current crisis.

The two Leaders assessed the current international situation from a common perspective. They reaffirmed a mutual readiness to closely cooperate and support each other further at the UN and in other multilateral platforms.

Held at Kyrgyzstan’s initiative, the telephone conversation (https://is.gd/Ppnjou) between President Vladimir Putin and President of the Kyrgyz Republic Sadyr Japarov focused on the situation with the special military operation carried out by Russia in Ukraine.

☝️ Sadyr Japarov said that Kiev was responsible for derailing the Minsk agreements and expressed his support for Russia’s decisive actions to protect civilians in Donbass. Vladimir Putin thanked the President of Kyrgyzstan for his principled solidarity.

The two Presidents reaffirmed their mutual commitment to strengthening the strategic partnership and allied relations between Russia and Kyrgyzstan in all areas.

President Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation (https://is.gd/oACYDq) with Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan.

The Parties continued their exchange of views on the practical aspects of the implementation of the agreements documented by the November 9, 2020, January 11 and November 26, 2021, tripartite statements by the leaders of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia on Nagorno-Karabakh, including efforts to ensure stability and security on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. Some items on the current bilateral agenda were also touched upon.

The Ukraine is dancing to the music of the Mighty Wurlitzer.  Don’t you do that too!  Turn the music off. Zone B is way behind Zone A in playing the organ, but way ahead in creating a life friendly to human people, for this planet.Margarita Simonyan focused on the 5th and 6th columns with a devasting phrase:

“If you are now ashamed that you are Russian, do not worry, you are not Russian,” she wrote in her Telegram channel.

And in the event that you are worried about China, they just posted this from their Russian embassy.  They truly understand that this time it is Russia, but for the throw of a set of dice, or a different tune on the Wurlitzer, it could have been China.

Captures

USA’s and UK’s “lethal aid” To Ukraine captured by DPR and Russian forces. SMAW-D & NLAW

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk201KFPXJM&ab_channel=PatrickLancaster

It’s about how you look at things

It’s all so easy to get caught up. Don’t. Sit down. Settle down and enjoy life more.

Serious considerations

I imagine at this point President Putin has convened a Stavka and he and the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces are now looking at all thinkable and unthinkable situations that could evolve that would impact the safety and security of the Russian people.

The President of the Russian Federation has to prepare the State apparatus for:

1. Sustained war against Russia
2. Explain to the people what they must do and why they must do it
3. Insure all civil defense structures are ready to house and feed the masses
4. Speak with the clergy to address all military personnel and give them the spiritual confidence to fight hard
5. Seek allies including China and make them all realize they will have to engage their forces now or perish

Russia waited too long and now she will saddle up and ride as fast as possible to meet the enemy head on and at full speed. The time for principled diplomacy has ended; the shashka has been unsheathed and it will cut the beast a thousand times and stab it in its dark heart until it is dead.

Oh, and what about Coronavirus?

Imagine that!

2022 03 01 15 50
2022 03 01 15 50

A fine Chinese lass

EDM. ED. ED. M.

It’s all so pop contemporaneous China. video. 3MB

Report from Russia

Transated from this article –
https://m.vz.ru/society/2022/2/25/1145802.html

The feat of the Russian special forces opened the way to Kiev –

The Russian army entered Kiev on Friday. This happened only on the second day after the start of the special military operation in Ukraine, which means that what is happening can be assessed as a grandiose success. However, there is reason to believe that the entire plan of the operation hung in the balance – and everything turned out successfully only thanks to the real feat of the special forces soldiers.

The most important event took place in the north of Ukraine, in the region of Kiev. It was there, at the Gostomel airport, on February 24, that several helicopters landed with Spetsnaz commandos.
https://youtu.be/rorZDGkcd54

In the video, several people, without fussing, set up a firing position on one of the outskirts of the giant Gostomel airfield to the sound of automatic bursts. The pathos of the plot was powerful and straightforward – Russian troops, just a few hours after the start of the operation, found themselves on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital. It was unthinkable to imagine something like this the day before.

The Antonov airfield (officially called Gostomel a few years ago) is the “home” airfield of the famous Antonov company. This is an airfield with a huge runway (three and a half thousand meters), covering hundreds of hectares. It operates and is equipped with everything necessary for the takeoff and landing of heavy military transport aircraft.

From a military point of view, Gostomel has a number of advantages over other Kiev airfields (Zhulyany and Boryspil). First of all, it is not used as often, it has much less staff and people in general. It is located on the right bank of the Dnieper, where the main administrative buildings of Kiev are located. It is closest to the city center. And most importantly, it is closest to the Belarusian border (only about 60-70 km), from where the Russian landing force advanced.

Apparently, special forces helicopters covered this distance over the Dnieper, which in these places, from the Belarusian-Ukrainian border to Kiev, is extremely wide. The instant appearance of a division of the Russian Airborne Forces twenty kilometers from the center of the Ukrainian capital means a knife at the heart of the Kiev regime.

Of course, the significance of what was happening was instantly understood in the Kiev military leadership. Throughout the night of February 25, there were reports of an intense battle was going on in the vicinity of Gostomel. The British Minister of Defense even announced that – “the Russian landing near Kiev failed, Russia lost hundreds of fighters.”

However, on the morning of February 25, it turned out that the skirmish in Gostomel did not subside at all – as it should have happened if the special forces had really been destroyed. On the contrary, it intensified. And in the neighborhood of Gostomel, other battles suddenly began. And there were reports of completely different tanks – Russian combat vehicles were found near the village of Vorzel, ten kilometers from the airfield.

It was, apparently, a special aid group made her way all night to the special forces soldiers surrounded at the airfield – and finally released it. Following which, there were reports of other combat groups of the Russian army approaching Kiev.

And a little later came the official message.

“On February 24, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation carried out a successful landing operation in the area of ​​the Gostomel airfield in the suburbs of Kiev. During the capture of the airfield, more than 200 nationalists from the special units of Ukraine were killed,” said the official representative of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Igor Konashenkov. Later it was stated that Russian troops completely blocked Kiev from the west.

We have before us an example of exceptional valor and military skill, shown to all of us in what is called real time.

You must realize why America is pushing this war against Asia…

Fight, fight, fight is all about distract, distract, and distract. The true face of what America is, is NOT pretty. I wonder why these images are not shown on CNN, BBC or FOX “news”?  video

It’s about how you look at things

The end of SWIFT

China’s Cross-Border International Payments System will give Russia a lifeline and accelerate the de-dollarization of the world.

https://asiatimes.com/2022/02/chinas-swift-alternative-may-undercut-us-sanctions/

This Chinese girl is in a purple place

It’s a weird place and state to be in don’t you know. All purple. All the time. Purple. Purple. video 5MB

It’s about how you look at things

France seizes suspected Russian-owned ship in Channel

Russia seeks explanation after ship thought to belong to company targeted by US and EU sanctions is held.

From HERE.

French sea police have seized a ship in the Channel that authorities suspect belongs to a Russian company in one of the first visible displays of the West enforcing sanctions on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine.

The cargo vessel transporting cars, which was headed for St Petersburg, is “strongly suspected of being linked to Russian interests targeted by the sanctions”, said Capt Veronique Magnin, of the French Maritime Prefecture. The ship was diverted to the port of Boulogne-sur-Mer in northern France between 3am and 4am local time, Magnin said, adding that checks were being carried out by customs officials and that the ship’s crew was “being cooperative”.

The US Treasury Department has issued blocking sanctions against the vessel saying it was owned by a subsidiary of Russian lender Promsvyazbank, one of the Russian entities hit by US sanctions.

The bank’s CEO, Pyotr Fradkov, is the son of Mikhail Fradkov, a former head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, who also served as prime minister under Vladimir Putin. Pyotr Fradkov was himself included in the latest round of US sanctions. Promsvyazbank, in a comment sent to Reuters, said its subsidiary no longer owns the Baltic Leader, and that it was bought by a different entity before the sanctions were imposed.

The Russian embassy in France is seeking an explanation from authorities over the seizure, Russia’s RIA news agency quoted the embassy as saying. The embassy also said the ship’s crew had been allowed to come ashore and move freely about the port.

The United States, European Union, and other Western states this week imposed extensive new financial and trade sanctions on Russia after it sent military forces into neighbouring Ukraine. The US Treasury said Promsvyazbank was put under sanctions “for operating or having operated in the defence and related materiel and financial services sectors of the Russian Federation economy.” It was also targeted by EU sanctions.

MM comments on this article

  • French sea police have seized a ship
  • The US Treasury Department has issued blocking sanctions
  • The Russian embassy in France is seeking an explanation

Ergo; France is a proxy nation taking orders from the United States.

It’s about how you look at things

Just focus on what is in front of you. One fry at a time.

Chinese girl on a bed

It’s pretty typical. yah. Nice smile. Like she ate a bird. LOL

video 5MB

Build up to Nuclear war?

From everything we see in the news lately about all the attacks against Russia,we may actually be heading for WW3 after all.

If the EU does provide military aircraft to Ukraine, and they allow them to based in NATO countries next door…

…then they emerge from their safe bases in NATO and fly out and attack Russian forces and then scurry back across the border.

There is no way Russia will tolerate that.

What they will do is that they will go across those borders and destroy all those bases, and the weapons there.

If that brings war between Russia and NATO then Europe needs to be sure they have enough nuclear bomb shelters around, because they are going to need them.

I saw on RT that Russia was going to start evacuating their citizens from the EU.

Now just what do we think that says… eh?

An important tweet

I think that Richard Moore, the chief of MI6, certainly revealed a lot when he tweeted this

“With the tragedy and destruction unfolding so distressingly in Ukraine, we should remember the values and hard won freedoms that distinguish us from Putin, none more than LGBT+ rights. So let’s resume our series of tweets to mark #LGBTHM2022.”

Peter Mann Comments

Not everyone knows the details and background of events happening halfway around the world, even for well educated and smart people. If they sit there and watch the mainstream news, they will obviously be victims to pervasive and well coordinated propaganda.

Confirmation bias is a strong force.

If you’re not careful, whatever you hear first becomes the truth regardless of facts. Even very smart people may be susceptible. Sometimes, arguments ensue. The first part of the comment relates to finding the truth, the second part more specifically on the current armed conflict, with a small prediction for the end game.

No need to argue. Challenge the seeker of truth to find out.
Here is a short clip from Brian Berlectic, an ex-Marine who has been living in Thailand and has done very good work showing his viewers the sources of his information, usually directly from the liar’s mouth. This is very similar to I. F. Stone, who exposed the liars by meticulously digging through information provided by the liars. My first exposure to I. F. Stone was his “The Hidden History of the Korean War.” It is important to know who the liars are, and then never trust anything they say.
How to learn the truth? Stay smart, read widely, read beyond the superficial, read between the lines, read the fine print, learn about the writer/speaker and his organization, get into the head of the author, be careful of false narratives, reject insidious adjectives, learn about deliberate omissions and obfuscations, look in the mirror, question everything, including your own beliefs.
Liars are not hard to expose, yet people prefer to believe in liars who are known to do nothing but lie. Ask yourself why. It’s very difficult if not impossible for a hypocrite to admit that he or she is a hypocrite. Americans like to elect them for a good reason.

 

Here is a clip from an Ukrainian girl Masha who is from Donetsk in the Donbass, about 20 kms from the war zone. She speaks almost perfect Chinese and works as a translator for Chinese businessmen in Kyiv. Her family has been living in the shadow of war for the past 8 years. Masha has done vlogs showing the bombed out areas. American poison has been creating hell for some Ukrainians but the hypocrites do not see it. Who paid for the poison? The American people of course.

There has always been a solution for peace; it’s known as Minsk II. But it’s another lie just like Camp David and Oslo. The Palestinians are weak and divided, so they will suffer what they must. But Russia is the largest country in the world with the most nuclear arms. Its people have destroyed Napoleon’s previously invincible Grande Armee and single-handedly killed over a million German soldiers who dared to invade their country. American lies of how they have saved the world from the Nazis are laughable for people who have read history beyond American propaganda. Why should anyone be so delusional as to believe that the Russians will sit there and be bullied into submission without a fight? The stupidity of these tiny European chihuahua countries like Georgia and Lithuania are so poisoned by the American lie that they really think they want to goad Russia into war. And when they have it, where is their protector overlord?
Ukraine is of course a basketcase. It is just a puppet government installed by the hegemon, and its comedian head of state has been following the American script of forcing Russia into war. All that suits America of course. This war would not have happened if America wanted peace. The war would be easy to avert and it’s not by America imposing the mother of all sanctions on Putin (the false narrative around which the political partisans are fighting; American mainstream media has become a farce). America only has to agree to let Ukraine be a non-military zone. How hard is that? How evil is Russia’s request? Russia’s position has been very clear from Day One. If America won’t agree, then Russia will turn Ukraine into a NMZ. For some reason, many pundits refused to see it. But America does not want peace. America wants wars that Russia will be fighting with its European neighbors. It will let America put its European vassals on a short leash, get Russia and Europe to destroy each other’s economy, and create bad blood for Russia and its neighbors while providing a lot of good propaganda for America, allowing the Empire to maintain its hegemony. It is nefarious as hell. And of course, the morons of America will suddenly decide that the lying politicians and lying mainstream media are telling righteous truths. Evil Russia has out of the blues invaded Ukraine without provocation. The stock market goes up because oil goes up and the Military Industrial Complex expects big contracts. The hegemon wins again, thanks to the Ukrainian Neo-Nazis acting as America’s attack dogs.

Once you cut through the bullshit and understand what’s going on, it’s easy to predict what will happen.

These people and countries acting as attack dogs for the empire must therefore be taught an unforgettable lesson. If you don’t put down the rabid dogs, they will get up and bite you again. Therefore, Russia will not take half measures. They will not stop unless the surrender is total, and punishment for the miscreants dealt out accordingly. Otherwise, this operation will be for naught.
Why argue? There is no morality in politics. If anyone believes there is, then they’re fools. Show me a country willing to crusade for the Palestinians and I’ll show you a moral politician. In geopolitics, one does not own anything one cannot defend. The rest is bullshit and balderdash.
For the same reason, I wrote two years ago that a golden opportunity presented itself for China to summarily reunify with Taiwan without bloodshed. I suspect a well planned operation at the golden moment will only take hours, certainly less than a day. The sooner it happens, the less mayhem America can cause with its poison, paid by American taxpayers of course. The American people will starve and die on the street, but they love a good war, and will spend any amount of money to fight the Russians to the last Ukrainian. How happy they will be to see the Chinese fighting the Chinese!
Peace out!
PM

Putin and Xi Peng

Great video. Video 2MB

How to defeat ‘Bot Trolls

Wow! Since I have incorporated my mix up of multiple subjects in articles, there was a near collapse in troll activity on MM. Of course, youse guys wouldn’t be aware of what’s going on as I don’t publish the majority of comments. But yeah. It’s all way, way down. It drives the algorithms crazy. They cannot handle dialog and it causes them to go zoomy! Whether a person or a ‘bot. They cannot handle mixed content in an article.

Quick update from the talks in Belarus:

Russians and Ukranians are trying to discuss how to end the conflict. The dude in the cap from Ukraine at the talks demands the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops from the Crimea and Donbass. Russia wants the end of NATO encroachment.

So don’t expect anything from these negotiations.

You will note that the Ukrainian negotiators all have their iPhones laid out on the table so that the US curators can hear every word.

Sovereignty, eh?

It’s about how you look at things

And today. We are looking at hamburgers.

Question everything!

An outstanding video. Very true. video 9MB

2022 03 01 16 00
2022 03 01 16 00

War in Ukrainian: cowardice, lies and chaos

Translated on MM from Russian.
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Shooting at residential buildings, distributing weapons and hunting for "saboteurs" - in war, all means are good
Valentin ALFIMOV
Due to the fact that Ukrainian troops hide their equipment in cities, shells fly right into residential buildings.
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THE PEOPLE ARE THE BEST PROTECTION
“Ukrainian nationalists place armored vehicles and artillery in residential areas of cities, using the population as a “human shield,” said Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov.
It turns out, indeed, that the Ukrainian warriors showed the world “innovative tactics” of combat. With a 100% guarantee, they learned how to take their technique out of the blow. Everything is very simple: you just need to brazenly stick a gun or “Grad” at the school, kindergarten or just under the windows of residential buildings. In other words, hide behind civilians:
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Here in the residential quarter of Severodonetsk, right at the school stadium, there is a calculation of 3 howitzers, a kindergarten was left behind the scenes. Ammunition is laid out next to each, the fighters are at the ready.
In a residential area of ​​Severodonetsk, right at the school stadium, the Armed Forces of Ukraine deployed a crew of 3 howitzers
Here is a military truck on the steps of the Odessa Opera House (an architectural monument, by the way) hiding from Russian intelligence right under the roof.
Military truck on the steps of the Odessa Opera House
Here is a self-propelled gun of the 92nd brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine rested its caterpillars on the balconies of house No. 308 in the Solnechny microdistrict of Kharkov.
And there are hundreds of such photos and videos now. The residents of the cities are starting to lose their nerves – in the same Severodonetsk, people went out into the yard to drive away the Ukrainian armored personnel carrier with the words to the soldiers “get out of here, we have a full basement of children.”
But Mariupol is especially affected by this , which was turned into a fortress by the nationalists of the Azov Regiment and the Right Sector (both banned in Russia). They placed mortar crews right on the roofs of high-rise buildings!
In Severodonetsk, people are trying to drive Ukrainian armored personnel carriers away from their homes
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IN YOUR OWN EYE THE LOGS DO NOT SEE
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Due to the fact that Ukrainian troops hide their equipment in cities, shells fly right into residential buildings. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation reported that a Ukrainian Buk missile hit a residential building in Kyiv.
The most striking example is the “Russian missile attack” on a high-rise building in Kyiv – the Zhuliany district. “The Russian aggressor is shooting at residential buildings!” – the news rushed through the Ukrainian propaganda channels and networks.
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The Russian Defense Ministry found out: “At night, there was a failure in the missile guidance system of the Ukrainian Buk-M1 air defense system and the missile hit the corner of a residential building.” And in general, “the Russian army does not strike at cities.” He doesn’t even hit the barracks, so that there are no big casualties. Only at military air bases and warehouses.
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A little later, local residents confirmed that the rocket came from where the Ukrainian units are stationed.
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Under such pressure, even the command of the Ukrainian army surrendered, they admitted that it was their missile.
But the NATO and Ukrainian media are already silent about this. The culprit has been found, but it has already been hammered into people’s heads – “Russians are hitting home.”
The icing on the cake of Ukrainian war tactics was the massive distribution of weapons. Anyone. Who wants. From trucks, machine guns are dumped on the asphalt like potatoes. Come, take it. Kiev set the trend, Kharkiv, Zaporozhye, Odessa joined a little later…
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“Political studies” for Ukrainian women and children
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From the armed people they form detachments of “territorial self-defense”, as under Makhno. These gangs have already begun arbitrariness and looting on the streets. Approximately every first one is seen as a spy. If they notice two, it’s definitely a sabotage group.
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So in Kyiv, a truck of the Ukrainian army and an anti-aircraft gun, which were driving to a shelter, were mistaken for Russian spies and opened fire on them.
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The crew of the truck fell down, and the anti-aircraft gun managed to leave, crushing a civilian car in a panic. A little later, the deputies of the Rada identified all the dead and confirmed that they were all Ukrainian soldiers. But this was already after the crowd had had time to mock the corpses: “So you, Russian saboteurs.”
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In Kyiv, the Strela-10 air defense system ran over a car driving along the road
In the same Kyiv, a family of five people who tried to leave the city were shot right in the car. They were also mistaken for saboteurs. Parents and one child died. Two more children are in critical condition in the hospital.
A family of five was shot dead in a car in Kyiv

The Nazis went wild – in order to get to Kyiv, they demand to correctly pronounce the word “Palyanitsya”. Russian-speaking Ukrainians can easily get shot for just mispronunciation.
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Women with children are trained for the same. “Political classes” are held right in the courtyards, where employees of the Security Service of Ukraine explain to residents: “Whoever has personal weapons at home, you can calmly use them to kill. Quietly, carefully from around the corner – and then dump.
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And the apotheosis of all this was the statement by the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine that it was releasing prisoners and distributing weapons to them. Ukraine is rapidly sinking into the Makhnovshchina..
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ACTORS GOT PRISONERS
In general, the fight against saboteurs has been raised to an absolute level, Everyone is looking for them and everything is under suspicion. And they do catch! Packs!
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So in Ukraine, more and more fakes with Russian “captives” are being launched. They are crushed in two counts. But the enthusiasm does not subside.
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So on one video, allegedly a Russian prisoner sits under a yellow-blue flag and lows through force: “Glory to Ukraine.” Only the director of this production grinned like a fool: this “Russian prisoner” turned out to be Panasyuk Yaroslav Fedorovich from Ternopil, a participant in the punitive war in the Donbass. His proud profile has already flashed on Facebook.
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Allegedly, the “Russian prisoner” turned out to be Yaroslav Panasyuk from Ternopil, a participant in the punitive war in the Donbass
Another guy in the video. Users found out that he did not come from Russia, but lives in Kyiv. “Warrior” happened to be handed over by a girl – she already posted pictures with him on her page and never deleted it.
The detainee allegedly “OMON” from Novokuznetsk, turned out to be a member of the military-patriotic club from the Ukrainian Nikolaev.
In the area of ​​the city of Gostoml, where the Russian Airborne Forces fought a hard battle for the airport, the Ukrainians shot down a Ka-52 helicopter, a local resident, Mikhail Pavlushenko, approached him. It was then that the SBU officers took him! And they managed to show in the news to report – “Russian pilot in captivity!”. Only later did it become clear that he was an archpriest of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. But at least someone is already interested.
Archpriest Mikhail Pavlushenko was passed off by the Ukrainian media as a “Russian pilot”.
Meanwhile, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko addressed the population and reassured them that there were no Russian troops in the capital. And why then does the hunt for saboteurs among the civilian population continue?
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U.S. GOVERNMENT ISSUES NUCLEAR BLAST SURVIVAL INSTRUCTIONS

It’s certainly curious timing.

USG Issues NuclearBlastSurvivalInstructions large
USG Issues NuclearBlastSurvivalInstructions large

Hamburger thoughts on a nice sunny day

Ah. But it’s all postering. There is not way that any serious concerns are given to Americans about Nuclear War. It’s all a game of “Chicken”.

Let’s think (instead) about a delicious hamburger!

The evil communists!

Ever since Trump it’s all been a big war against “evil communists”, but sheech! What changed? China is doing well now. Russia is doing well now. The West is turning into a shit hole. video

The 10 Rules of Ikigai

They are:

1. Stay active and don’t retire.
2. Take it slow.
3. Don’t fill your stomach.
4. Surround yourself with good friends.
5. Get in shape for your next birthday.
6. Smile.
7. Reconnect with nature.
8. Give thanks.
9. Live in the moment.
10. Uncover and Follow your Ikigai.

 

2022 03 01 15 53
2022 03 01 15 53


Slowing life down is a mindful and deliberate choice. While not always an easy one, it leads to a greater appreciation for life and a greater level of happiness.

Solid MM advice, don’t you know.

ZIRCONs On The Move — UPDATED 6:30 AM

2022 03 01 15 03
ZIRCON missile.

ZIRCON Hypersonic Nuclear Missiles (Land Attack Missile Version) have been loaded onto tracked, Road-Mobile Launchers, and are presently on rail cars being moved publicly inside Russia.

Prototypes were test-launched from a Tu-22M3 bomber in 2012–2013.

Launches from a ground-based platform followed in 2015, with first success achieved in 2016.

In April 2017, it was reported Zircon had reached a speed of Mach 8 (6,100 mph; 9,800 km/h; 2,700 m/s) during a flight test. Zircon was again test-fired on 3 June 2017, almost a year earlier than had been announced by Russian officials.

In November 2017, Colonel General Viktor Bondarev stated that the missile was already in service. Another flight test reportedly occurred on 10 December 2018, during which the missile demonstrated that it could attain a speed of Mach 8.

On 20 February 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed the missile is capable of accelerating up to Mach 9 and destroying both sea and land targets within 1,000 km (540 nmi; 620 mi). By the year’s end, on 24 December 2019, Putin stated that Zircon’s land-based version was in development.

Warhead > 300 HE , > 200 kt tnw nuclear

INVISIBLE TO RADAR

Zircon can travel at a speed of Mach 8 – Mach 9 (6,100–6,900 mph; 9,800–11,000 km/h; 2.7–3.1 km/s). This has led to concerns that it could penetrate existing defense systems. Because it flies at hypersonic speeds within the atmosphere, the air pressure in front of it forms a plasma cloud as it moves, absorbing radio waves and making it practically invisible to active radar systems (Plasma stealth).

The final section of the missile’s trajectory will be overcome in under 10 seconds.  As such, the enemy does not have time to carry out all the necessary procedures needed to even TRY to intercept it.   Moreover, the Zircon exchanges information in flight and can be controlled by commands if necessary to alter course of change target.

Missiles like this could, in theory, be fired from Russia, and hit the Capital cities of NATO member countries bordering Russia.

You know, the Capital cities of countries participating in ejecting Russia from the SWIFT banking system; or other countries supplying weapons or now fighter jets to Ukraine, to be used fighting Russia.    It would happen so fast, and with such Stealth, that the countries being targeted wouldn’t even know the missiles were coming until their Capitals got hit and blown up.

The 200 kiloton warheads would obliterate the cities that were hit. In comparison, the USA blasted Hiroshima with a 15Kiloton warhead.

UPDATE 6:30 AM EST —

From Russian Ministry of Defense:   “In accordance with the order of the President, the duty of the command posts of the Strategic Missile (nuclear) Forces, the Northern and Pacific Fleets, and the Long-Range Aviation Command have begun combat duty with reinforced personnel.”

This means that the order Putin gave earlier, to get them ready, is now being fulfilled and they’re operating in a high alert/readiness mode. Nukes will be armed and prepared & ready to strike — if order given.

7:18 AM EST–

Russia’s top military command has ordered heavy strategic bomber flights in effort to block US and EU military aid from getting to Ukraine, per a defense statement. Russia has tried to “fully destroy” Ukraine’s airfields with missile attacks, per Ukraine MoD -Foreign Policy.

UPDATE 7:22 AM EST —

The “masses, who are asses” (in Kiev) are lining up at . . .  Supermarkets . . . . trying to buy food.   As usual, the overwhelming majority of the general public are so utterly stupid, they make absolutely ZERO plans and take absolutely no action to protect themselves,, even though they’re in Day 4 of an actual shooting war.   Don’t be like these morons – get your preps right now.  Don’t wait.

When the missiles start flying, you don’t want to be like these people.  Oh, and if the missiles start flying, credit/debit cards won’t work because all the computers and communications lines will be out.  No way to get authorization for any purchases.  So you’d better have cash money in your possession before all hell breaks loose!

UPDATE 7:26 AM EST —

Russian Ministry of Defense — Russian Air Force has gained air supremacy over the entire territory of Ukraine as of this morning.

RUSSIA NUKE ALERT CAUSED BY BRITISH!

Kremlin blamed nuclear alert on Liz Truss. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov:

 "There were unacceptable statements about possible conflict situations and even confrontations and clashes between NATO and Russa. I will not name the authors of these statements, although it was the British foreign secretary"

Kiss of Death?

SWISS DEFENCE MINISTER SAYS “WE HAVE CONCLUDED USE OF RUSSIAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS RELATIVELY UNLIKELY, POPULATION SHOULD NOT BE AFRAID”

(HT REMARK: When government tells you things are safe, that’s when you panic)

Deliveries of Germany's weapons to Ukraine make us wonder if the process of denazification was completed in Germany itself 

- Russian Foreign Ministry

UH OH!

3:00 PM EST —

BIDEN SAYS AMERICANS SHOULD NOT BE WORRIED ABOUT NUCLEAR WAR

The US State Department said that Washington stands for the defense of the principle of non-nuclear war and does not see the need to increase the level of readiness of its deterrence forces.

Russia has not shown any interest in some sort of deconfliction mechanism with the United States over the Ukraine invasion, Pentagon says.

UKRAINE NEWS@kuringechuwa· At the moment, military pilots from Ukraine are in Poland. Today they receive 29 Polish MiG-29s. With full weapons and electronics.

(HT Remark: So Poland has now become a defacto Ukrainian military base.   This won't end well.   I suspect the very MOMENT those planes take off, Russian fighter jets and surface-to-air-missile batteries will be ordered to target them all and destroy them all as soon as they cross into Ukraine air space.)

No one in government seems to grasp that It’s all bait.

That’s why it’s the OLD Russian tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, trucks and stuff in Ukraine. I suspect it will only be Two or three more days.

Putin will act.  He warned everyone publicly.   He meant what he said.  He WILL act.

I suspect Poland first.

Then US/UK.  — Especially the UK.  I think they’ve been severe trouble makers around the world for decades and I personally believe they need to get absolutely crushed by Russia.  Mercilessly crushed!  It will not surprise me at all if the very first UK strike is against the CITY of LONDON within London itself.  That’s where all the contracts are.  That’s where all the global financial shenanigans get decided.  I hope they glow.

Possibly Germany after that, it seems, from the “de-Nazification” comment reported on this page earlier today.

4:53 PM EST — 

Looks like the ground war in Ukraine is about to turn much darker.  Putin is sending a 17-mile long convoy of artillery and tanks towards Kyiv with intense helicopter support and fighter jets all over it to take out any attackers.

Programming the Retards Has Begun:

2022 03 01 15 14
2022 03 01 15 14

Could A Small Nuclear War Reverse Global Warming?

Ukraine Armed Forces says that if necessary, the planes they’re getting from other NATO countries “will be able to be based on Polish airfields from which Ukrainian pilots will perform combat missions”

BEING SUPPLIED TO UKRAINE, TODAY:

  • Bulgaria  (MiG-29) – 16
  • Bulgaria  (Su-25) – 14
  • Poland  (MiG-29) – 28
  • Slovakia  (MiG-29) – 12

Tomorrow Finland will begin a Parliamentary Discussion to join the NATO Alliance, this could take weeks or only a few hours it just depends on how the Finnish Government is feeling, NATO has already said Finland can be admitted to the Alliance within 24 Hours after a decision.

This will result in only one of two outcomes…

EITHER

[1] Putin feels the overwhelming pressure on his border, takes a win, and slowly works to try and repair the extreme damage that’s been done to his economy…

OR

[2] He’s decided that Russia will no longer cow to the threats posed by NATO and decides everything to the west of his border will be reduced to ashes.

It’s a terribly risky strategy being run by the Europeans…they’ll either wind up looking like heroes and saviors…or like nothing at all and with no one to care.

China nurtures it’s best and brightest

Meanwhile the USA does the exact opposite. School selection is determiend by lottery with attendence optional. Sheech! And all these people are armed with guns! video 3MB

Open letter to TV watching western armchair generals

From the Saker

My dear TV western armchair generals,

I get it, I promise.  I really do!

Your entire life you have been trained to see a successful military operations like so:

    • Begin by bombing the shit of the “hadjis” or “sand niggers” with bombs and missiles, then flatten their town à la Fallujah, then move in with heavy armor and shoot everything which still moves or breathes.
    • Then distribute chewing-gums to a few kids while on video.
    • Then take the city center, drop a statue in front your embedded presstitutes, and then declare victory.
    • Then, after declaring victory, stay another 20 years or so (Blinken was clearly projecting!), ruin it completely, then leave it again and declare another brilliant victory.
    • And don’t forget to declare urbi at orbi that you reserve the “right” to bomb the shit out of them anytime you deem it is needed.  And fuck their sovereignty or anybody else’s while we are at it!
    • Lastly, once home, don’t forget to “thank” your “veterans” for their “service”.

I get it.

Now YOU try, please!!

Now, in spite of this conditioning, please at least try to understand the following points:

First, the Russians do not see Ukrainian as Hadjis but as their own brothers.

Second many/most LDNR soliders have relatives in the Nazi occupied Ukraine.

Third, yes, Russia can turn any Ukrainian city into Fallujah, but who do you think will then have to pay for its reconstruction?

Fourth, please understand that the double goals of 1) denazification and 2) disarmament implies that any person which is not a Nazi or is not armed and hostile is not, repeat, NOT the target of the Russian armed forces.

Fifth,  the Ukie military was 80% defeated on Day 1.  Get that?  It was gone as a coherent fighting force.  THAT is why they are blowing up bridges, distributing weapons and releasing convicted criminals.  NOT because they are winning!  I mean – how stupid are you if you believe that?  Ukie stupid?

Seriously?

Right now you are the object of probably the biggest PSYOP operation in history. If you realize that and treat these PSYOPs as you should, that is as “informational warfare from the bad guys” you will be able to tell your kind and grandkids “I never believed that crap”. Good for you!

But if you don’t, well then, just don’t tell too much about you in 2022 to your kind and grandkids, save yourself the ridicule and embarrassment…

That’s it. My very last attempt to wake you up.  From now on, I will pretend like you don’t exist and instantly ban any comments parroting kind of self-evident nonsense.

Now I will quietly leave your room, switch off the lights, and let you watch your TVs.

Andrei

How is Chinese media reacting to growing tensions in Ukraine? How are Chinese citizens talking about this on social media? 

During the last few days, all the western embassies in China have been releasing a flurry of statements, like never before, with the aim of pressuring the government to distance itself from Russia, and to affect Chinese public opinion on the issue. However, on social media people have been mocking this campaign and questioning why this seems so coordinated, lots of jokes and memes have arisen.

Overall, Chinese people do not see a need to comment on a conflict that isn’t theirs. Until recently, everyone understood this as a western attack on Russia, and now the discussion is about why the west feels the need to play out their conflict on Chinese social media.

I saw one comment saying that the west ‘thinks we can’t see international news because of the firewall, that’s not true’. Above all, China does not want to be involved in any kind of war and always believes in doing everything to avoid war. While the Chinese government maintains that position, the Chinese people will not feel the need to react to these kinds of conflicts.

Hamburger / cheeseburger thoughts

The Winter Olympics are now over, how do Chinese people feel about how the games went? 

I think people are feeling a bit empty now that it’s all over, it was a highly successful event. It has awakened, for the first time, a huge interest in winter sports and people are buying the gear.

China performed well, winning 15 gold medals, placing them in 3rd place [above the US]. This success has been the number one tendency everyday on Chinese social media as people have been able to interact with the games virtually but without disrupting everyday life because the whole games took place within the physical bubble created within Beijing.

The Digital Yuan, a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) was adopted in a big way for the time during these games. What is it like to experience the birth of this CBDC? 

The Digital Yuan was used during the games but it was not the only form of payment permitted. It is a long way from mass adoption within China, it’s being used in some zones where there are trial runs, but not on a mass scale.

China already has multiple venues for digital payments for everything, the country never really saw bank cards, it jumped from a cash economy straight to digital payment through phones etc.

WeChat and Alipay are the most prominent ways to make payments within China, so the government will have to work to promote this CBDC, which is basically a cryptocurrency, and change the habits of consumers.

China banned private cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin firstly for environmental reasons. The country has strict goals for carbon reduction and mining Bitcoin is extremely harmful.

The CBDC was launched with international commerce, rather than domestic commerce, in mind. It is being launched as an alternative to the US dollar, it is very far away from achieving that, but existing as an alternative option to USD for international trade is the aim and so the US sees this as a great threat because they use the power of the dollar to enforce sanctions. For example, the US was able to sanction European companies that were trading with Iran because the trade was in dollars.

Pretty girl in a red halter

I always liked halters. Most women don’t however. They tend to keep sliding down, and so you’ve got to tug and tug and tug to keep them up high. Sheech! video

PM Comments;

Art of War, Sun Tzu. America harms Russia without suffering a single casualty. America doesn’t care about Ukraine. Its just an attack dog.

In a real fight, the attack dogs die first.

But the attack dogs can bite and harm Russia.

What about America having to spend billions to arm Ukraine so the attack dogs will have teeth? Money is nothing to America.

They print their trillions, which come from the people’s debt, while the money created goes to the elite-owned Military Industrial Propaganda Complex. Which a part of which supports the political/technology/media structure which keeps the country in perpetual war and provides unlimited budgets for war. It’s a perfect cyclical economy that supports the capitalist Big Lie that a number on a ledger created out of thin air represents wealth.

Not only that, but the rest of the world eventually helps to pay for the war budget because the USD is the worlds reserve currency.

Anyone who disagrees will be starved or bombed to the Stone Age, except for China and Russia who can defend themselves.

America prints trillions and the world suffers from inflation, not just America.

The elites don’t pay for inflation, as their property holdings will increase in value, the people who pay for groceries, rent, and daily necessities suffer from inflation but who cares.

Not only that, but distant wars actually help the American war-based economy and cause the US Dollar to rise in value against its profligate printing.

In war zones, people tend to hoard US Dollars, taking US Dollars out of circulation.

America also makes it hard for US Dollars to be repatriated.

So the hegemon wins when you are forced to fight a war against your brethren who have been turned into attack dogs for the empire; you’re also paying for it. This is a good lesson for China to not find itself in such a poor strategic situation.

What can Russia hope to achieve from this unwanted war? Russia must from now on be much more influential in the affairs of Ukraine.

  • All de-Russification must be reversed, including the separation of the Orthodox Church.
  • The Russian language will be one of the official languages to be taught at schools.
  • The Neo-Nazis will be deligitimized and their crimes duly prosecuted.
  • Ukraine must have a treaty with Russia and be a member of the federation.
  • Foreign media and NGOs must be licensed (actually best simply kicked out and kept out, as they are mostly disinformation agents and spies.—TGP)
  • There will be Russian bases. Then we’ll have peace.

Alternatively, Russia will employ FOABs (enormous bombs short of nuclear—TGP) which will kill everything within a 300m radius. It will be cruel, but such is war. Learn from Sun Tzu, do not get yourself in that situation.

Hopefully, the Ukraine side will finally come to its senses. When Russia succeeds in their operation, it will be the turn of the three Baltic states to shake in their boots, NATO or no NATO.

—PM

It’s about how you look at things

Conclusion

Look at the big picture, and then relax. The war in the Ukraine is not a sporting event. Rather it’s a catalist forcing the world to choose sides. The aftermath will be a bio-polar world rather than a uni-polar world, and those that stick with the USA are going to be in trouble.

Big picture so far:

[1]  Europe threw itself off the cliff. It is Officially Game Over. All that’s left is the autopsy.

  • RT & news blocked,
  • Cultural, sports & local-carriers air travel to Russia blocked,
  • A separation from financial infrastructure,
  • Open hostility evident through support of Nazis in PsyOps and ostensible but meaningless arms.
  • Everything calculated for a generational rupture and impotent group-hate shriek at Russia..

Predictable results:

  • A near-term loss of existential 50% petroleum products,
  • A loss of 40%+ grain products and the withering away of Europe.
  • Pity. European cost of living will be Biblical come next Dark Winter.. And an exodus to Russia and other sane points likely beforehand.

[2] The “WW3 OR Sanctions” threat by Biden was actually directed at EU. It was the trigger to get the loons to leap off the cliff. How will Russia punish the deceitful USA piper, which has now wrecked the western peninsula of Asia for the next 3+ generations?

US squats, toad-like, pretending to be the whistling innocent bystander at the scene of the epic European ritual suicide. It is in the role of Annatar during the Fall of Númenor – urging the fool King Ar-Pharazôn to sail on the gods themselves.. the Sundering and drowning of Númenor itself is next on the playlist. Someone should send that memo to the AZE; Europe and Anglo-lands are now forever chained together..
https://youtu.be/nL_DcMu2KpU

[3] I saw this amusing movie with Clint Eastwood decades ago, “Every Which Way but Loose (1978).” The operative mission regarding Russia is now, “Weaken Them Every Which Way Possible.” And to destroy the gutless Europeans simultaneously is a bonus treat at the Bonfire of the Vanities.

So current calculations focus on the DAILY $700-750 million Russian export earnings. Much of these daily earnings is to Europe. They do not have time for a war of attrition this time.. It is a cold shut-down.

In part, the group hate and hysteria campaign is to “psych themselves” and convince the sane in West it’s a necessary cost, to hurt themselves to hurt Russia. Cut off your damn nose Frenchie, we have excellent plastic surgeons in the Bayou.

[4] There is no nuclear war on the current cards (Phew!). According to the Kremlin, their action yesterday was in reaction to words from Perfide Albion. They have since been put in their tiny place. Deconfliction is on between Americans and Russians. The relevant issue is the suiciding of Europe, not the longed-for first strike.

[5] China (& India) sit pretty. A 500-year Beast is making a dramatic exit from the stage. Pfizer is doubly doomed – folks are so excited in Zone B, there is no need even for Viagra anymore. What support Russia needs, be it diplomatic, financial, new business arrangements (buying that grain and extra gas), lighting a million candles, are quietly being made.

Half-cocked Korean Rocketman rattled off missiles in his no-longer-pudgy fist, to help the loonies focus fully on their Death March in the heavenly rich black soil of Novorussiya.

Indeed, this is the Last March of the Russia Haters, in commiseration with the Last of the Mohicans. And both shall soon be in the museum with the Dodo. An ongoing flood of Ukie refugees is the cherry on top.  So Russia extracted the necessary concessions from Zone B partners to wield the brass knucklers on behalf of mankind.

It has the depth of support in Asia to see to the necessary dirty task.

Maybe all-in-all, maybe things will go “tits up”, or maybe not. What I do know is that now is the time to relax, regroup, and plow forward in new and exciting directions. Eat some delicious food. have a good time. Play with friends, and by all means; be the Rufus.

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.

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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Prostitution in ancient Rome. What people did before social media, football, and stamp collecting.

I’ve been devoting more than enough time about the current Geo-political events around the world lately. I’ve posted some stuff about MAJestic and “Alien Interview” and some other stuff. But now, I want to breathe some life into some of my historical articles.

Ancient Rome has always fascinated me. As it was an empire that grew and collapsed by the massive internal corruption of it’s leaders and their inability to adapt to a changing world. But it is more than that. I am fascinated with the personal stores and histories of the people who lived then.

Not just Rome, but Greece, and many others.

In fact, I loved the fashion and clothing of the period and I had books on Roman fashion, clothing, furniture and all the rest. Once, when my brother visited me in Boston he was amazed that I had such books, and he carted off a box load to his home to read at his leisure later on.

Today we will look at prostitution in ancient Rome.

And you know, it was a different time and a different place. Back in those days, going to a prostitute was similar to going through a drive-through to get a hamburger. It was no big thing.

It was not an issue.

Everyone did it.

Men, women, boys, girls…

In ancient Rome, going to a prostitute was no big thing. It was as common as going out to eat a cheeseburger is today.

There just weren’t any vice laws to control the population through their desires, and all the social prohibitions that society has been shackled with since the middle ages. And knowing that is liberating…

Liberating in a way that gives us insight. An insight that tells us that there are other ways of doing things. Other ways of living. Other ways of happiness, social interaction, and society.

And THAT is what we are going to talk about here.

We will start with the historical segment, and then end up with a Geo-Political article that discusses what happens (or what might happen) when a dominant cultural influence is displaced by other powers.

Paying for Services: Illicit Brothel Coins of Pompeii Show What’s on The Menu

From HERE.

Today, there is a strong, negative stigma surrounding the occupation of prostitution. It is often looked upon as “sinful”, “detestable”, and “shameful”—both for the prostitute and the participant. In ancient Rome, while everyone certainly had their own views of the practice, it was far more socially acceptable.

In fact, brothels were somewhat of a staple in vacation cities like Pompeii and Herculaneum. (Which is helpful for archaeologists, as both those sites remains “frozen” in time.)

These staples eventually grew to encourage their own form of coinage, called spintriae in the Medieval period (though this name is misleading in ancient records). The prevalence of prostitution in Roman culture is highlighted through the wide circulation of these coins, and the plethora of imagery in the aforementioned vacation sites in southern Italy.

Ancient Sex Tokens – A Different Kind of Coinage

Roman brothel tokens were rather obvious to the everyday money-handler. The token had various sexual acts depicted on both the front and rear of the coins, usually the participants on the coin in the act of intercourse. Some depicted phalluses instead, full-formed and often with wings attached, likely indicating the virility of the man using the coin. While male prostitutes and female participants were not uncommon, it was far more common—as far as literature can tell—that wealthy males sought the company of a meretrix, or legal female prostitute.

It is also notable that the tokens predominately depict male-female relations rather than relations of the same sex, likely indicating that homosexuality (at least outward homosexuality ) had become far less acceptable by the time of the Romans than it was for their predecessors in ancient Greece.

One of the most prominent theories about the creation and purpose of the coins was to advertise the prices of sexual acts. Further, in passing a coin between two people—i.e., the buyer and the “seller”—one could maintain a level of privacy. This would have been particularly important to those of high status who did not want their late night dalliances known. It is believed by some scholars that “the sex act depicted on each coin corresponds to the price listed on the opposite face,” which has also been considered clever as it is “a system that would also have helped dissolve language barriers”.

If this theory is true, then one must consider that the coins themselves were not forms of payment; rather, they were more akin to calling cards or order slips. As one would say, “I would like a number 4” at McDonald’s and pay for their food at the window, an ancient Roman would pass the token and then subsequently pay for the service before or after it occurred.

A more recent find of a Roman brothel token in London, called the “Putney token” for the bridge it was found near, was examined in 2012. As it is known the Romans had forts, camps, etc. in ancient Britain, the theory that these coins were used to get around language barriers is furthered. Britain’s Romanization was slow, thus so was the spread of the Roman language; however, an image of sexual intercourse is universally understood.

Were the Tokens an Early Form of Payment?

It is possible that these tokens were at some point used as a form of payment. Despite circulating only in brothels and between buyers and sellers, there is an indication that it would have been in the participants’ best interests if the coins were worth something. Cassius Dio, a Roman historian in the 3rd century AD, recounts one tale during the reign of Caracalla in which a coin bearing the face of the emperor was used in a brothel. This was seemingly seen as an insult to the emperor, and the man who used the coin was sentenced to death:

Granted, Caracalla has been described as one of the more temperamental emperors of the Roman Empire and perhaps reacted far more angrily than another emperor in this position would have; yet this tale indicates the that it might be best to keep sexual favors and imperial coinage separate from one another.

A Different Perspective

Prostitution was far more of an acceptable “career choice” (it wasn’t necessarily a choice) in ancient Rome than many believe; the current stigma of prostitution has damaged the reputation of what many consider the oldest occupation in history. Roman historians Livy, whose History of Rome is comprehensive, and Tacitus, credited as one of the better surviving sources of Roman culture and war, both dictate that prostitutes often had positive reputations, and often came from good families.

Emperor Augustus encouraged the occupation, making it “neither illegal nor stigmatized in ancient Rome, and in fact it was not unusual for an independent-minded upper-class woman to become a courtesan; when Augustus decided to encourage reproduction in the upper classes by taxing unmarried adult patricians, many women registered as whores so as to avoid being forced to marry.” (McNeill)

Thus, one should be careful about putting one’s own cultural perspectives on the ancient position, as the influx of Roman tokens found only furthers the reality that prostitution was a highly respected field for a long time.

The Lupanare: Prostitution and Houses of Pleasure in Ancient Pompeii

From HERE.

Mad emperors, fierce warriors, brutal entertainment, and lascivious lifestyles. These are the familiar images of ancient Rome, but what was it really like? Rumors abounded regarding Roman emperors and their indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh. Tiberius, for instance, is said to have indulged in secret orgies in his pleasure villa on the island of Capri. But until the 16th century discovery of the buried city of ancient Pompeii, the guilty pleasures of the Romans had been mostly hidden from the pages of history.

Ancient Pompeii: Roman Life Frozen in Time

Pompeii is a 6th century BC Roman city frozen in time, preserved by the layers of ash that spewed out from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Although Pompeii was initially rediscovered at the end of the 16th century, it was only properly excavated in the 18th century. This was due to the fact that excavators were startled by the sexually explicit frescoes they were frequently unearthing; something quite shocking to the sensibilities of Medieval citizens of Rome, so they quickly covered them over.

When excavations resumed nearly two centuries later, archaeologists found a complete city almost entirely intact. Loaves of bread still sat in the oven, bodies of men, women, children, and pets were found frozen in their last moments, fear still etched onto their faces, and the remains of meals were found discarded on the pavement. The astounding discovery meant that researchers could piece together exactly what life was like for the Romans of ancient Pompeii: the food they ate, the jobs they performed, the houses they lived in, and of course, the activities they engaged in for pleasure.

Discovering the Carnal Pleasures of the Romans in Ancient Pompeii

Excavators unearthed evidence of numerous brothels in the ancient city of Pompeii, as determined by the discovery of both erotic frescoes and graffiti adorning the walls of buildings containing several rooms with stone beds. The phallus was a very common decoration for good luck in Pompeii and it was painted in the houses, streets, and shops.

One of the famous brothels in ancient Pompeii was called the  Lupanare (Latin for wolf’s den). Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, this was a two-story building built just years before the destruction of Pompeii. Believed to be the only purpose-built brothel in Pompeii, the Lupanare had ten rooms and a latrine under the stairs.

Each of the ten rooms had a stone bed covered with a mattress where a prostitute would entertain her clients. Another famous feature of the Lupanare is its erotic wall paintings. Each of the paintings depicts a different position for sexual intercourse , and these are believed to have served as an advertising board for the various specialties that were on offer.

Despite the erotic nature of these images, it has been suggested that they were merely an idealized version of sex. To regard them as a representation of the actual transaction would be tantamount to regarding contemporary pornography as the real thing. Thus, it has been postulated that the lives of the prostitutes at the Lupanare was far grimmer than the erotic images suggest.

The chambers where the prostitutes worked were windowless, cramped, and uncomfortable places separated from the anteroom only by curtains. Furthermore, it has been suggested that most of the prostitutes in Pompeii were slaves of Oriental or Greek origin. As they were involved in the slave trade and not trained in other professions, it seems that these women had no real alternatives for work. In the CBC program The Nature of Things , Dr. Kelly Olson, a professor of classical studies, visits the Lupanare and claims “it’s not a very nice place to work.”

Their clients, however, seem to have had a better time at the brothels, as demonstrated by the graffiti that they left behind. There are over 100 inscriptions on the walls of the Lupanare. One inscription, for instance, runs simply as such: “I screwed a lot of girls here.”

Another inscription even records the date that the person visited the Lupanare, “On June 15th, Hermeros screwed here with Phileterus and Caphisus.” The wealthier members of society generally did not visit brothels, as they were able to afford mistresses or slave concubines. Thus, it is more likely that those who frequented the brothels of Pompeii and left the graffiti behind were ordinary Romans.

Interestingly, the clients of the Lupanare also left notes on the wall that allowed archaeologists to work out the prices of the services provided there. It seems that two loafs of bread and half a liter of wine would enable a person to obtain the services of a prostitute. Needless to say, the fees were paid to the brothel owner, rather than the prostitutes themselves. Such is the life of a prostitute in a brothel of Pompeii, as far as the archaeology is able to tell us.

The Lupanare was first excavated by Giuseppe Fiorelli in 1862 and it was during this work that the archaeologists discovered the now almost 2,000-year-old erotic panels on the ground floor of the brothel. The frescos and other sexual objects created by ancient Romans and discovered in the ruined city have been the subject of much contention. The explicit frescos for example were covered, and some claim that up until the 1960s only male visitors were allowed to view them for an additional fee. The ancient brothel was restored and opened to the public after an investment of $253,000.

Deemed as scandalous at the time of their excavation, many of the more erotic objects discovered in ancient Pompeii were removed and taken to the Naples National Archaeological Museum. They were placed in the Gabinetto Segreto  (the so-called “Secret Cabinet”), which was founded by Frances I, the King of Naples, who decided that certain explicit images were to be seen only by “people of mature age and respected morals.” It was only opened to the public in 2000.

These days, the restored Lupanare is open for tourists to explore and learn about prostitution in ancient Pompeii . According to the Daily Mail , several tourists have even tried to relive the sexual antics of the Romans, breaking into the brothel or the suburban baths “to fulfil their fantasies.”

The Grim Reality of the Brothels of Pompeii

From HERE.

Like the anxious men who began excavations at Pompeii in the 18th century and discovered more about the ancient Italians than they had bargained for – such as phallic-shaped lamps – historians of sex are regularly confronted with case studies from the past that challenge their own ethics. Those who worked the streets of Pompeii and served clients in the brothels lived hard lives, yet many of the murals that survive depict the women as erotic and exotic.

Murals from brothels and buildings that served as brothels (such as inns, lunch counters, and taverns) show fair-skinned women, naked (except for the occasional breast band), with stylized hair, in a variety of sexual positions with young, tanned, athletic men. The figures sport on beds that are sometimes ornate and festooned with decorative quilts.

In buildings identified as brothels, the murals may have been intended to arouse clients. They may also have functioned as pictorial menus or even served as instruction manuals for more inexperienced customers. In buildings identified as private residences, the scenes were most likely decorative but also designed, perhaps, for titillation.

Contrary to the idealized images, the brothels themselves provide evidence that the women worked in cells, usually only big enough for a narrow bed. The absence of windows in most attests to the darkness of the cells, as well as limited air flow.

Excavations also suggest that the cells were usually without doors, which implies that the rooms may have been curtained. They have also revealed stone beds. Wooden beds as well as pallets were likely also used, but would have perished in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

The conditions in which the women worked were of no concern to brothel owners, clients or anyone else for that matter, as most sex workers in ancient Italy were slaves. As the ancient attitude towards slaves was one of indifference at best, and violent disdain at worst, the lives of women were no source of empathy to those outside their class.

The sex workers fulfilled a utilitarian function and nothing else. Confined to the premises by (usually) male pimps who provided them with only their most basic needs, the women were essentially cut off from the outside world. This rendered them vulnerable to the whims of both pimp and client alike.

Women who worked the streets in Pompeii often waited around archways and other standard locations such as graveyards and public baths. In larger towns and cities, where control of the sex trade was harder to manage, some of these women may have worked without pimps. Those who made up this percentage of workers were mostly freed slaves and poor freeborn women.

Stories From Graffiti 

The preservation of graffiti on the walls of Pompeii’s buildings also provides historians with details of the sex trade. Most of it is extremely graphic. It includes information on specific services and prices, clients’ appraisals of certain women and their abilities (or lack thereof), and some sexual advice.

Some graffiti are straight to the point:

Thrust slowly

Others are advertisements:

Euplia was here 
with two thousand 
beautiful men

Or a list of prices for various services.

Often the names of slaves and, by default, sex workers, had Greek origins. The name “Euplia”, for example, comes from a Greek word meaning “fair voyage”. Sex workers’ names sometimes denoted the function or physical features of the individual in question. In this case, Euplia promised her clients a fair voyage.

Graffiti also attests to male sex workers in Pompeii. As with the writings concerning women, this graffiti lists specific services offered and sometimes prices. As freeborn women were not permitted to have intercourse with anyone but their husbands, the clients who accessed male sex workers were almost exclusively men. The sexual mores of ancient Rome, catered for male-to-male sexual encounters if certain protocols were maintained (a citizen could not be penetrated, for example).

The few literary records that suggest there may have been female clients of sex workers are questionable, as they were usually written for satiric or comedic purposes. Still, it would be naïve to discount instances of wealthy, freeborn women accessing male sex workers or household slaves.

Similarly, it would be naïve to assume that male clients did not seek other men with whom they could participate in acts deemed socially unacceptable (essentially acts in which the citizen male would occupy a submissive role).

Society and the Sex Trade

At the time of the eruption of Vesuvius, Pompeii was a town of modest size, with a population of around 11,000, and a thriving community with sophisticated architecture and infrastructure. Located in Campania, some 23 kilometers southeast of Naples, and near the port of Pozzuoli, it enjoyed robust trade and economy, and had a multicultural demographic.

The prosperity of the town and the continual presence of merchants ensured a strong market for sex. Indeed, the sex trade was integral to the successful functioning of society, particularly marriages.

As marriages, particularly those among the elite classes, were arranged and predominantly for the birth of male heirs, a husband would not seek sexual pleasures from his wife. Rather, out of respect for her, a man would pay for pleasurable sex, especially those acts that were not expected to be performed by a respectable woman.

Indeed, the graffiti attests to five different types of sex for sale: intercourse, cunnilingus, fellatio, active anal sex, and passive anal sex. Thus the sex trade performed a type of social and moral policing of the institution of marriage, as well as the preservation of an adult male’s reputation and masculinity. As sex work was not illegal (being predominantly structured around slavery) but adultery was outlawed, this was another reason for paying for sex.

The layers of volcanic materials that covered Pompeii and most of its population to a depth of 25 meters (82 feet) left extensive evidence of the ancient Italians, their lifestyles, and their environments. Ironically, the eruption that trapped the inhabitants in both time and place has bestowed a strange immortality upon them.

These people whisper to us, and their tales are varied, joyous and sad. Their stories are sometimes shocking and even heartbreaking, but, like the lives of the sex workers, worthy of remembrance.

The Graveyard Prostitutes of Rome and Beyond

From HERE.

Ancient regulars of the world’s oldest profession may have grown bored with the “usual” items on the coitus menu. That may be why ancient Rome enjoyed a thriving sexual ecosystem with robust variety and a market for all kinds of Roman prostitutes. Yet the dynamic sexual menu, made infamous from excavations at Pompeii, is given little to no mention in history, particularly when it comes to the Bustuaries or graveyard prostitutes.

he cemetery or graveyard prostitute is an intriguing vocation within the sex trade of the era. But don’t assume that graveyard prostitutes were an archaic hedonistic niche desire, of interest to only the most degenerate Romans. After all, graveyard prostitutes continued well into the modern era, in trying times such as the Covid-19 pandemic. This begs questions as to the allure of combining lust and death in sexual practice. Perhaps studying the history of the Roman Bustuarie, we can find some answers.

Prostitution in Rome: The Hierarchy of Roman Prostitutes

According to many scholarly sources, by the first century AD Rome was home to a thriving economy of 32,000 legally registered sex workers, along with additional slaves being sold into the sex trade almost every day. Those sold into slavery began either as children or pre-teens, who were then made to solicit and rapidly learn the ways of pleasuring.

But not all Roman prostitutes were slaves. There were a small number of registered voluntary citizen sex workers acting on their own accord. In other instances, despicable men would force their daughters, wife, or sisters into prostitution to gain extra income; however, this particular act would later be made illegal by legal decree under the rule of Theodosius the Great. As of that point, all men found guilty of soliciting family members would lose legal custody.

Of the registered prostitutes, the upper Roman patrician class’s most elite sex workers were known as the high courtesan Delicatae. Even the delicious Delicatae, who were seductive rebellious daughters from upstanding patrician families, hoped to bring shame and scandal to their elite familial name.  Though the Delicatae were usually masked, and therefore protected from being recognized, the fact remained; they existed to those who knew where to find them.

Other forms existed in temple cults dedicated to Isis, Ceres, Magna Mater, Venus, and Pax. For those who were of the Roman lower castes, most registered prostitutes could be found in local, dingy, and unventilated brothels, steamy bathhouses, and even taverns mediated by pimps. Even with these many venues of operation, other variations of prostitute existed for those looking for something cheap, if not a little dicey.

Besides the broad range of registered Roman prostitutes on offer, there were also unregistered free agents known as Prostibulae. Made up of unregistered prostitutes, these were usually self-employed freed slaves or extremely poor women who avoided paying heavy roman taxes by any means necessary.

Some became known as Ambulatae, who were unclean, provincial streetwalkers, waiting outside or near to the high-priced brothels, gladiatorial arena venues, theatres, and circuses ready and willing for just two pieces of coin. The Ambulatae would not have the same alluring erotic candles or signs to point customers their way. Instead, they relied on revealing garments, and if they were lucky, erotic cookies in the shape of penises to advertise their services.

Dark Desire: The Bustuarie Graveyard Prostitutes

For those who were too timid to approach the Ambulatae, there was always the option of an encounter with a Bustuarie cemetery prostitute, the lowest of the low on the hierarchical scale of Roman prostitution. Bustuarie prostitutes mainly operated within the graveyards and underground tombs of Rome. They were described as shameful, gaunt, pale, and sickly, all descriptions akin to the dead themselves. In the early morning, they offered their services as mourners for hire, but by night they were ready to fulfil any dark desire.

The Bustuarie used chalk on the backs of headstones to advertise their prices, and engaged in sexual acts within tomb passages and secluded plots. Graveyard prostitutes could be found throughout the Roman Empire, and even in the outskirts of Londinium (modern-day London). Their clientele was made up of grave diggers, eager pseudo-necrophiliacs and vulnerable mourning widowers. They were exquisite navigators in finding the emptiest of mausoleums, the softest of burial plots, and even the cold slabs of tombstone that presented an opportunity for intimate discretion.

There were even stories of fair-skinned women resting on ancient tombs with gold coins upon their eyes, not as a payment to the ferryman to cross into the underworld, but payment by the God Orcus for her lustrous services. With a reputation for sexually satisfying the God of the underworld, the Bustuarie were able to provoke the interest of any young Roman wishing for an experience bordering the boundaries of death and love. However, what of precaution and disease when in the presence of a prostitute surrounded by death?

Safe Sex? Hygiene Amongst Roman Prostitutes

Prostitutes, registered or not, were still treated as slaves, and once someone had been associated with employment in the sex trade, their fate was sealed. Within the world’s oldest profession, life would forever be a struggle for survival rather than an adventure filled with the thrills of carnal desire. The living conditions alone made the ancient life of prostitution disease-ridden, painful, and extremely uncomfortable. Even with such inhumane conditions, there were still cultural customs within the sex trade of Rome.

In the brothels throughout the Roman Empire, it was very common for the rooms to be small, windowless, and penetrated with the stench of purchased intimacy. The only light would come from phallic-shaped candles, used to indicate when a prostitute was ready for her next client. More often than not, water boys would stand outside the brothel rooms readying their bowl for the finished clients to clean themselves after payment was given.

In the ancient world, brothels were known to have their own water mains, allowing prostitutes to clean themselves in between clients. However, their water rations would only allow for cleaning their essentials rather than their entire bodies. The prostitutes, such as the cemetery Bustuarie, were given no such luxuries. They were expected to guarantee satisfaction for their clients from dusk until dawn, and would then await their turn at the public bathhouses only if they had made enough money to enter.

Though bathing was a luxury, the appearance of cleanliness was essential for maintaining clients in ancient Rome by way of scent, style of dress, and grooming. For those who didn’t have access to bathhouses or brothel water supplies, another option developed. While it didn’t help much when it came to hygiene, at least it created the delusion of cleanliness. The Bustuarie used perfume to mask the scent of death and stench of previous encounters.

Clothing, Fashion and Appearance: The Mark of a Roman Prostitute

Prostitutes had a particular look which made them stand out from other women. This distinction also aided in advertising their profession without saying a word. The brothel prostitutes or high-class elites wore very revealing green sleeveless tunics, along with green shoes to indicate that they were ready for clients. The wardrobe of a Roman prostitute also included blonde horsehair wigs decorated with golden chains or curls. Purple lingerie, revealing silks, flaunty golden jewel necklaces, bracelets, and very short attire, became popular in later periods of Rome as well. It was illegal for prostitutes to wear anything that resembled a long band since those were customary of dutiful married women to carry.

Also common for the ritual beautification of Roman prostitutes, was the use of makeup to redden cheeks and lips. They also practiced depilation, or the removal of unwanted pubic hair, by way of arsenic and burnt lime which painfully singed the hairs from the legs, armpits, and genital areas.

The lower caste of Roman prostitutes was usually naked or laden with belts made of straw to indicate their profession to the eyes of eager men. The cemetery Bustuarie was typically scantily clad, or just as naked as the streetwalkers of Rome. However, their appeal was in appearing as pale and as gaunt as possible. As mentioned before, many clients desired making love to corpses and found the Bustuarie the perfect way to fulfil their fantasy. When they performed the act, they would lay as still as possible and remain limp for their clients to indulge, before asking for payment.

The Financial Burdens of Prostitution

Along with the effort required to stay attractive and clean, the stresses of the continued pursuit of revenue forever loomed over prostitutes from every social class. By the second century BC, registered prostitutes had to carry permits to partake in the sex trade. In their application, they were required to list their current name, place of birth, age, and pseudonym to keep their family name anonymous.

In ancient Rome, any women who earned money independently was considered to either dabble in prostitution or be the manager of prostitutes. No matter what level in society a prostitute was, money was a significant part of their livelihood. With many registered prostitutes, heavy taxes were enforced, which essentially counted for a third of their daily income. If they did not report to the local tax collecting Aedile, they faced termination of their registration.

By 40 AD, Emperor Caligula alleviated the extreme taxation of prostitutes and the charge was reduced to the equivalent of one client per day. This reveals how profitable legalized prostitution was for the Roman Empire. Unregistered or independent prostitutes, including the streetwalkers and Bustuarie, it was necessary to nab at least two clients a day to subsist. One payment would go to a piece of bread, and the other to wherever they were staying, or to access to the local bathhouse. Without this, the Bustuarie would not be able to eat that day.

Unregistered prostitutes were in constant danger. While they were pursued by Roman tax collectors, they were admired for their resilience by both the people and select politicians. In ancient historic and literary accounts, prostitutes, no matter how rich or poor, were respected for their discretion, a code of honor which was highly regarded in Roman society.

Prostitution and Infanticide in Roman Times

Part and parcel of a lifestyle filled with allure and desire, was the concern of conception at any moment. Although the ancient world had developed certain contraceptives, becoming pregnant was very common amongst prostitutes, as was the practice of infanticide. In the current era, infanticide is rightly perceived as a negative and very unfortunate. However, in ancient Rome infanticide was completely up to the father. If the family’s patriarch dubbed the child unnecessary, he was in his legal right to dispose of the child, however he wanted. Often the reasons behind an act of infanticide were due to deformity, or, regrettably, if the child was a girl.

Roman prostitutes who were burdened with an unwanted pregnancy often killed their babies shortly after birth. The Yewden Villa excavations at Hambleden conducted in 1912 uncovered the remains of 87 babies. While the Leon Levy expedition to Ashkelon revealed the remains of 100 infants within the bathhouse sewers. These discoveries indicate the sheer indifference demonstrated as the human remains were found in waste piles next to dead animals and garbage. Analysis indicated that the children were murdered the day after they were born.

Infanticide was no stranger to the graveyard prostitute. Their unwanted children would have been abandoned in local garbage sites or left in the cold gutter near the roads leading to the graveyards. In other instances, unwanted children would be exposed or abandoned near to market places or crossroads to either perish or be adopted by others.

To the ancient Romans, infanticide was commonplace. It was viewed as an effective birth control method and was far less dangerous than abortion methods. However, not all unwanted children were killed immediately. In some instances, babies were kept alive until a certain age and then reared to become prostitutes themselves.

The brothels discovered in Pompeii revealed a significant difference in gender preference when practicing infanticide. The boys born of prostitutes were killed due to the danger that could come from the existence of illegitimate sons born from high-status Roman men. During Augustus and Claudius’s age, laws were put in place that ordered the death of any newly born bastard boys from prominent families. The law was put in place to assure a strong stance against adultery. At least in Pompeii, girls may have been spared from death since they could be sold into the slave trade or trained become prostitutes within thirteen years. In all other instances of infanticide, it appeared that babies were killed indiscriminately and without gender prejudice.

Graveyard Prostitutes after the Roman Empire

Although the attitudes towards infanticide and slavery may have changed, some cultural aspects regarding prostitutes and brothels have continued up until the present day, especially when it comes to graveyard prostitutes. Though the Bustuarie were considered the lowest and poorest of prostitutes, their popularity was far reaching throughout the empire and continued after its demise.

While culture and customs changed over time, the dark desire for fornication within gravesites grew ever more popular, reaching its peak during the Black Plague of Europe in the mid-1300s, an event which resulted in the death of almost half the population in certain European countries by 1360. Surrounded by death, the anxiety caused by the lack of any cure, and incessant praying for fear of God’s wrath, it appears that the surviving population was aroused by the idea of morbid acts of graveyard sex.

Amongst the piles of dead bodies, people would pay prostitutes to join them in death-defying orgies to celebrate life. This has been explained by scholars as a method of coping with the devastation inflicted by the Plague. The acts became so popular that in places like France, the Papal office decreed laws and ex-communication to anyone caught in morbid sexual act with any prostitutes near or in graveyard sites.

Since the papal office believed that sexual immorality was a key factor for the Plague, feared that continued sexual escapades within cemeteries would invoke further death. The act itself did take many lives, including the prostitutes who took advantage of the new-found demand. As many as two-thirds of working prostitutes perished, leaving very few in active service during those times. With such limited supply in the sensual sale of flesh, many authorities turned a blind eye so that others could enjoy prostitutes during the peak of infection.

Though Europe would eventually gain control over the spread of the Black Plague, the practice of graveyard prostitutes continued on and were very prominent in the 1940s, especially after the liberation of Naples. In many accounts, it was commonplace to see people having sex on gravestones. The reasons behind this sexual activity appear similar: after such immense death and devastation, it was time to celebrate the best of life by putting on a show for the dead. However, as the world currently endures the Covid-19 pandemic, are attitudes of the current millennial generation in tune with our European ancestors when it comes to sexual intercourse among graves? The answer is absolutely!

Since the global outbreak in 2020, there have been global reports of individuals having sex in graveyards. Many cases have occurred throughout England, raising concerns related to public indecency, the spread of Covid-19, and the desecration of church gravesites. As Watts reports, “the world’s oldest churchyard in Torquay is being used by people openly having sex and sunbathing nude in broad daylight.” Priests, such as the Roman Catholic Monsignor Arthur Coyle, were caught soliciting for sex at the Holy Trinity Polish Cemetery, in Boston Massachusetts, USA.

It would seem that even though the graveyard Bustuarie were the lowest of the prostitute caste system in ancient times, throughout the ages they have remained desirable and psychologically appealing, especially during times of world devastation. Is graveyard sex an act of moral defiance and social deviance in times of global unrest? Or, could it be that paying money for sex in front of the dead serves as a coping method for devastating loss?

Exposing the Secret Sex Lives of Famous Greeks and Romans in the Ancient World

From HERE.

In the ancient world, the public were not so privy to information about the scandalous sex lives of central societal figures. Still, sexual rumors have always existed and, in this way, historical figures became famous for their sexual exploits.

William the Third is rumored to have preferred men to women. Catherine the Great had many lovers and she reportedly gave them gifts even after the affair was over so that they might help her find her next man. The press ran pamphlets about Marie Antoinette’s sex life as well. She was rumored to have participated in orgies where she slept with her brothers-in-law as well as with other noblewomen. Genghis Khan is said to have been with so many women that today there are around 16 million of his living descendants. Julius Caesar liked both men and women and, in the case of men, his political enemies used to say that “He was every woman’s man and every man’s woman”.

Tiberius’ Twisted Sex Practices

Emperor Tiberius is regarded as one of the most sexually twisted rulers. He ruled between the years 4 and 37 AD and his biographer Suetonius stated that, in later life, the emperor had built himself a porn center on Capri. There, young people engaged in elaborate sexual acts both with Tiberius watching as well as with his participation. In the emperor’s bathing pools, the youths were trained to fellate him underwater while the old emperor called them “his little fishes”.

Speculations and Suspicions

Greeks and Romans had a relaxed attitude regarding nudity and they adored the human form. However, once a person died, the human body no longer posed any interest. As a result of this, their knowledge of detailed human anatomy was mostly based on speculation.

For example, there was a strange belief stating that women’s wombs vagabonded about the body causing hysteria. In order to treat this, doctors used bad smells along with loud noises to scare wombs back into position. There were also strange beliefs regarding the clitoris; a large clitoris was considered to be a medical condition requiring surgery.

Kissing in public was not seen as something positive in the Greek and Roman aristocratic circles. Still, husbands did kiss their wives when they returned home at night after having been to parties. The purpose of this was not affection. Instead, they used kissing in order to determine whether or not the woman had been drinking during the man’s absence. Kissing also lost popularity when Roman citizens from Spain began to brush their teeth with human urine.

Gladiators’ Scandalous Sex Lives

Many well-known gladiators also had scandalous sex lives. They were considered very attractive by women, even those that were slaves.  However, not all gladiators were slaves. For example, Commodus preferred his role as a gladiator to being an emperor. Like many other rulers, Commodus also pursued sexual degradation in his spare time.

Commodus’ parents, Faustina and the emperor Marcus Aurelius, had a marital problem that was caused by a gladiator. Faustina had a strong lust for a certain gladiator and she told her husband about this desire. The emperor then consulted a soothsayer who provided the following solution: Faustina was ordered to have sex with the gladiator – who would be killed while he was on top of her. Then, she was obliged to bathe in the man’s blood, clean up, and finally have sex with her husband.

Antinous

Sabina and Hadrian had an arranged marriage. The empress followed her husband on his year-long circuits across the Roman Empire. Even though the emperor used to sleep with many other women and men outside of their marriage, the two spouses treated each other with respect.

This changed when, around his 50th year, the emperor met the love of his life in Antinous, a teenage boy from Bithynia. The two became inseparable and the wife became an unwilling witness to the couple. On a later tour, the three reached Egypt and, in October 130 AD, the youth disappeared.

Hadrian was overcome with grief. He ordered many searches for the teen, but they all ended in nothing. In a few weeks, the emperor deified the boy and founded a city in his name. Thousands of statues were made of Antinous and his worship was ordered throughout the empire. The busts of Antinous exist even today in museums and, sometimes, they are misidentified as Dionysus or as Ganymede. Years later, Hadrian also deified Sabina when she died.

The Punch Line

We often forget about the past. We look at the past, and look at other nations, from OUR experiences, from OUR lives. From OUR understandings, and from OUR societies. And that is so very, very true if you are a dumbed-down “sheeple” living in one of the Western Nations.

You think that arresting a Chinese citizen, who worked and lived in China, who ran a Chinese business inside of China was fine because her Chinese company (using Chinese technology, Chinese inventions, held under Chinese patent control) violated your American laws.

It’s ignorance of a profound nature. Chinese laws are different, and when you live in China you obey Chinese laws. Not American laws.

The days of this kind of nonsense is over.

The world is changing.

And if you are the least bit versed in understanding change, you will see that the future is very very bright for the vast, vast 80% of the population of the world.

The only people that are having fits are super oligarchs like George Soros and Michael Bloomberg who are watching their power crumble before their very eyes.

Read on…

Why is the development of China a problem?

From HERE.

Editor's note: Ismail Bashmori is an Egyptian observer who lives in Toronto, Canada. This is a shortened version of the author's original article. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

As an Egyptian observer, I have been studying about China for the past year – its government, society, history and transformation – and have talked with hundreds of Chinese and China-haters for the past three months. I have seen the great achievements of China, together with the hate and fear of some Western politicians.

China’s story since the 1980s has been one of an almost divine metamorphosis. The country has ended extreme poverty, taken the lead in the world’s 5G network rollout, launched three astronauts to its new space station core module, landed its Zhurong rover on Mars …

China is developing. Is it a problem?

Some Western countries hate and fear the rapid development of a country that once was weak. They can’t believe their 400-year-old global supremacy is being challenged. That’s why, although the United States has killed millions of people and screwed several regions in the past 30 years, your television, newspapers, Google news feed and social media are all  24/7 condemning China, which has not sanctioned any country or overthrown any foreign government. None of the accusations made by Western politicians and media are backed up by evidence.

China is not affected by the noise and maneuvers of her enemies. What’s going on now, the stupid “new Cold War,” is nothing. For her first 20 years, from 1949 to 1971, China was basically blockaded and isolated economically and politically by the West. It didn’t have a seat in the UN General Assembly. And it was dirt-poor in those days, barely a speck of the global economy – not even able to prevent famine. And it still didn’t submit to pressure or take any orders from foreign countries. Why on earth would it do that now?

Some countries seem quite “warm-hearted” on “leading” others.

As Jimmy Carter pointed out, the U.S. has enjoyed only 16 years of peace in its more than 240-year history. Besides the four large wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. has also invaded Lebanon, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, Libya, Uganda and Syria.

Aren’t you at least curious to see what a world might look like without the leading actions of any warlike nation in the future?

Hum…?

Imagine a world where the U.S. and Australia are no more important than Uzbekistan or Paraguay. A world where the International Court of Justice might be headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, the World Bank in New Delhi, the United Nations in Jakarta, the International Monetary Fund in Cairo. A world liberated from the U.S. banking system and the dollar as its reserve currency so that Washington can no longer tell 200 other countries who they can and can’t trade with. A world where no country can escape from war crimes and no one has to escape from their hometown.

I see China as hope.

Hope that a colonized, brutalized and humiliated country can rise above its past – refuse to be weak any longer – rebuild itself from nothing with iron resolve and become too strong to be overrun by the West aggressors again. I hope that a non-Western country can find its own solutions to its problems, proving that relying on the “leading” and interference from the West is unnecessary and sometimes even stupid.

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.

New Beginnings

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles 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.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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Going through one of the poorer fifth tier cities in China, a video exposé.

Yeah. This is what it is like. I’ve got a video that you’ll all will want to see. It’s pretty good. Almost as good as being here. It’s a pretty much grass-roots view of China in one of the “back water” towns in the “hinterland”. LOL. I think that you will all enjoy it.

But first…

… let’s talk about things that aren’t so serious. I mean, why not? Right? Like Pistachios. And Jarts. And blueberry pop-tarts, and big breakfasts with baked beans, easy over eggs, and lots and lots of bacon. And coffee. Percolated coffee. Thick.

The postman always drinks twice.

Not so serious things.

Or, maybe serious.

And right off the bat I want to discuss some of the odd things that make me scratch my head in thought. Well, actually pet my beard, up and down, and go hummmm.It’s some thoughts that aren’t big enough for a post of their own, but curious enough not to omit.

And the first up is this little critter. Kinda cute. You know.

Cute little creature. I think that he is a really good candidate for an actual dragon. Don’t you?

I always thought that dragons were a creature from fantasy, and the legends of dragons might be from remote memories of dinosaurs in our common shared humanity. But here, it pretty much seems definitive. Here be an actual dragon.

So here I am, minding my own business and I come across this little picture. I look at it, scroll past it. Pause. Stop. Think about the little guy, and go back to him.

He’s sort of cute, eh?

And here’s a group of guys from “Trailer Park Boys”. Not so cute. They remind me of my friends from Arkansas. In fact, their stereotype can pretty much be found all over America.  Not that it’s bad mind you, but that it is not the narrative, its the way people interact with each other at different levels of financial success or distress.

Here’ to “the crew”!

Trailer Park Boys chilling out.

I know that it is supposed to be a comedy, but really I actually know a lot of people like this. It’s the human experience, don’t you know.

The human experience.

You all have a front-row-seat. Don’t you know.

And speaking about the human experience, look at this little tool. It’s advertised to massage the gums. But come on! You aren’t  going to tell me that that’s the real purpose of this little gizmo. Are you?

Designed to massage the gums.

No. The real reason and the real purpose of this little device is to make it easier to pick your nose. Now with this vibrating finger your nose can be really get all clean and worked up.

Next up is a nostalgic picture.

When a government is working, and efficient, and has crime under control, inflation doesn’t exist. All inflation can be traced back to government mismanagement at some level. And sure there are all kinds of excuses justifying it’s existence, I like to believe that it is a measure of government mismanagement.

With that in mind, look at this picture please…

The good old days.

…and then, boom!

We are back to serious things.

Where has Americans’ income gone?

By Ding Gang 

Ten years ago, I went to New York City with the correspondent group of then Chinese premier Wen Jiabao's delegation. After we arrived, the Chinese side invited some former US senior officials and entrepreneurs to hold a symposium. At that time, the trade imbalance between China and the US was already prominent.

Wen gave the example of an iPod player, whose price was about $290 in the US at the time, but a Chinese manufacturer can only get $6 from each sale. I remember there was a heated discussion in China at that time - we would exchange 800 million shirts for a Boeing plane.

Do Americans earn more because they make more money? From what I have learned during my visits to the US these years, prices of commodities did not change much, or even become cheaper as production bases have been moved to China and other countries. But wages for middle- and low-income Americans have not risen much, or none at all. Reports show that in a 2015 contract between the United Automobile Workers and the Detroit automakers, senior workers received just a 2 percent annual pay increase, after suffering a 10-year pay freeze.

Where has Americans' income gone?

To answer this question, we need to look at the earnings of the biggest companies in the stock market. Apple, for example, was number one, with a net income of $57.4 billion in 2020, up from $14 billion in 2010. Of course, the growth of income of the senior executives at big companies and the big investors is even more startling. In January, The New York Times reported that "America's richest 10 percent, who own more than 80 percent of US stocks, have seen their wealth more than triple in 30 years, while the bottom 50 percent, relying on their day jobs in real markets to survive, had zero gains." 

Economist Jonathan Rothwell listed an example in his book A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society: In Spain, Sweden and Iceland, doctors earn twice as much as the average worker, but in the US, physicians and surgeons earn nearly five times as much.

Such a huge gap between the rich and poor will bring at least two troubles for the future reforms in the US. First, the large-scale relief measures which aim at helping relieve the pressure of middle- and low-income Americans will actually help big enterprises, the rich and the upper class. In other words, the measures won't address the problem of the rich-poor gap.

Second, the US design of system is based on the principle of "profits first." But the increase of profits for big companies comes more and more at the cost of unemployment of the middle and lower classes. As New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote, "We're in the middle of a pandemic that has crushed jobs and small businesses - but the stock market is soaring. That's not right. That's elephants flying. I always get worried watching elephants fly. It usually doesn't end well."

Both of these issues touch upon the old issue of raising taxes from big companies and from the rich. This will inevitably touch the foundation on which the US is built - competition in the free market economy which aims at improving efficiency. Moreover, getting vested interests to concede benefits is not an easy task.

If money can't be obtained from taxes, there is only one way to go: printing more money. When things get to this point, it is no longer just a question of whether the social divisions can be healed, whether people can be united to move forward.

US economist Stephen Roach recently pointed out that last year, the combined COVID-19 relief packages in the US hit a total of $5 trillion, or 24 percent of GDP in 2020. This far exceeds all records. On March 6, US Senate passed President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill. 

Will this destroy the world's confidence in the dollar? After all, green note is the foundation of US hegemony.

Will all this destroy the world’s confidence in the United States dollar? Heck! You bet. It’s already destroyed, and most nations welcome alternatives. Leading the pack is China with Gold Backed digital yuan. And trading directly and electronically.

Which brings up this most timely article from the Economic Collapse Blog;

Brace Yourselves For The Most Dramatic Shift In The Standard Of Living In All Of U.S. History

They are assuring us that we don’t have to be concerned about “inflation” because they have everything under control.  Do you believe them?  The value of the U.S. dollar has been steadily declining for a long time, and most Americans have grown accustomed to having the cost of living rise at a faster pace than their paychecks do.  But over the past 12 months an enormous paradigm shift has begun.  Instead of devaluing our currency a little bit at a time, now our leaders are going “full Weimar”.

Our money supply is growing at an exponential rate, and this is becoming a major national crisis.  As I pointed out yesterday, it took from the founding of our county all the way to 2020 for M1 to reach 4 trillion dollars.  But then from the start of the pandemic to today, M1 has gone from 4 trillion dollars to 18 trillion dollars.  To call that “economic malpractice” would be way too kind.

The truth is that it is complete and utter lunacy, and we are all going to literally pay the price for such madness. Sadly, inflation is already starting to show up in a major way all throughout our economy.

For example, most Americans have noticed that the price of gasoline has really started to shoot up over the last several weeks

Gas prices have been increasing at the pump for the past few weeks, reaching a national average of $2.77 a gallon as of Monday, which is 39 cents higher than the same time in 2020, according to AAA.

A lot of people are alarmed by this, but the Federal Reserve insists that this is completely normal.

Meanwhile, the price of agricultural commodities has risen by 50 percent over the past year…

The price of agricultural commodities traded on the global stage has shot up by 50 percent since the middle of 2020, according to economists at Rabobank.
In a new report, the bank pins the lift in the price of wheat, corn, soy, sugar, and a range of other commodities on the northern La Niña, a weakening US currency, market speculators, and rising demand from importing nations.

As those prices are passed along to the consumer, you will be paying more for groceries at your local supermarket, but authorities assure us that prices will stabilize once the economy returns to “normal”.

The good news is that at least the price of food is not rising as fast as the price of lumber is

Lumber prices have increased more than 180 percent since last spring, and this price spike has caused the price of an average new single-family home to increase by $24,386 since April 17, 2020, according to the NAHB standard estimates of lumber used to build the average home.

Now that is some serious inflation!

There are so many people that have had to put their plans to build a home on hold in recent months because the price of lumber has gotten so ridiculously high.

But the experts at the Fed insist that those that are warning of hyperinflation just have wild imaginations. Over the course of the past year, our leaders have pumped trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars into the system, and all of that money has to go somewhere.

In such a highly inflationary environment, this sort of a thing can happen

A digital collage by American artist Beeple which exists only as a JPG file sold Thursday for a record $69.3 million at Christie’s, fetching more money than physical works by many better-known artists.
‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’ became the most expensive ever ‘non-fungible token’ (NFT) – a collectible digital asset that uses blockchain technology to turn virtual work into a unique item – after being listed at the start of the two-week auction for only $100.

The U.S. dollar is being transformed into “toilet paper money”, and we are rapidly approaching the point of no return.

At least if our paychecks were rising as fast as the cost of living was, American families would be able to keep up with the escalating prices. But of course that is not happening, and more Americans are falling out of the middle class with each passing day.

In fact, vast numbers of formerly middle class Americans no longer have jobs at all.  Last week another 712,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits, and the number of claims continues to hover around “four times the typical pre-crisis level”

Weekly jobless claims have remained stubbornly high for months, hovering around four times the typical pre-crisis level, although it’s well below the peak of almost 7 million that was reached when stay-at-home orders were first issued a year ago in March.
There are roughly 10 million fewer jobs than there were last year in February before the crisis began.

This is not what an “economic recovery” looks like.

The truth is that the U.S. economy is broken, and the only solution our leaders have is to print, borrow and spend even more money.  Now Biden and his minions are about to pump another 1.9 trillion dollars into the system. Do you think that will make the inflation crisis better or do you think that it will make it worse?

You don’t need to answer, because the answer is self-evident.

As prices soar into the stratosphere, life is going to become increasingly difficult for most Americans.

If your income does not rise as fast as prices are going up, your standard of living will go down. Of course you will be far from alone.  The vast majority of Americans are about to experience a dramatic shift in the standard of living, and most of the population doesn’t even realize what is happening.

All they know is that more government checks are on the way, and most of them are absolutely thrilled about that. But all of this printing, borrowing and spending has put us on a path to national financial suicide. As we continue to recklessly destroy the value of our currency, other nations will begin to realize that a move to a different reserve currency is needed.

And once the U.S. dollar is no longer the reserve currency of the world, there will never be any going back to the “good old days”.

We are so close to the economic endgame, and the word “collapse” is not nearly strong enough to describe what is eventually going to happen to the United States.

Yikes!

It makes me yearn for the good old days.

Well for all the good stuff that I have to say about China, now I am going to vent on some of the bad stuff. It’s not that I want to, but sometimes it’s just so frustrating. You want to eat some olives, and some slices of cheese, maybe Swiss or a fine Lorraine, and the only think that you can find is the pseudo cheese slices. Ugh!

It is difficult to truly enjoy cheese.

Ah. The Chinese enjoy everything, but cheese seems to elude them. Sigh.

Oh sure, you can find it here, but it’s not common and it’s not enjoyed the same way. It is sprinkled on items like you would sprinkle salt and pepper. Not layered and melted into a smooth creamy consistency. Like on Pizza.

It’s treated like a spice. Not as a major food group.

Which brings me to the delicious subject of Fondue. Now, I know it’s not all that popular in America these days, but at least there’s a few Americans get to try it at least once a year or so. And at that, when you pair it with a fine wine, it becomes a wonderful occasion.

Oh, and do not mistakenly believe that you need to buy any expensive fondue pots, pans or utensils to make it. You don’t. All you need is a pan, and the ingredients, and some long stemmed forks. That’s it. So what is stopping you?

Eh?

From HERE

Fondue is a traditional Swiss dish that is prepared from pieces of cheese, thermally melted with white wine in a special fondue pot – “caquelon”, to a creamy consistency, flavored with cherry rakia or cherry brandy. It’s tasted by dipping hard bread cubes, rolled in the melted cheese with special fondue forks.

 Fondue is a warm dish that can contain one or more types of cheese, usually Gruyere and Vacherine Fribourgeois. It is the main national dish of Switzerland together with с raclette. It is also known in the Eastern French regions Savoie and Franch-Comte since the 1950s where it is prepared with Beaufort cheese or Comte cheese.

Now, maybe the “officially correct” way of making fondue uses the dish, the forks, and the special cheeses. But we are just simple people wanting to have simple pleasures with our friends… RIGHT NOW.

Here’s a hint, you make use of what you have. And you call up your friends, and you add some wine. Some nice music, and you all work together to make that delicious cheesy fondue happen.

Delicious fondue.

And he continues on the narrative…

At the table, the fondue of melted cheeses is served in the so-called “caquelon” (a type of enameled, cast iron or ceramic pot) in which pieces of bread are dipped with a special fork with three prongs (there are also forks with two prongs, but they are mainly associated with the meat fondue – the Bourguignon or the Chinese type). The fondue pot (caquelon) is located on a metal pad (usually made of wrought iron) at the base of which is located the heat source (a heater or candles) that keeps the fondue at the desired temperature throughout the meal.

Fondue forks are long-stemmed with a round handle. A piece of bread or rarely potato slices (traditionally consumed with Fondue fribourgeoise) are dipped into the melted cheese stirring in a circular or a figure-eight motion of the fork. 

When removing the fork from the fondue, it should be rotated continuously in a circle so that the melted cheese doesn’t drip outside the pot. The soaked mouthful is served towards the mouth when the cheese is already cooled to a suitable temperature for consumption and thus a full taste is achieved.

It is a common rule for cheese producers to sell ready-made cheese mixes, especially for fondue preparation, which makes it possible to avoid the difficult choice of the cheese combination. In Switzerland, these cheese mixes can be found in supermarkets.

They are not generally found in the United States, and most certainly not in China.

But that’s the price you pay when you live in different areas. If I lived in Switzerland, I would be in “seventh Heaven” smunching on all that delicious food. I’ll tell you what.

There are many and varied Fondue recipes. For example, before beginning the fondue preparation, several cloves of garlic can be crushed at the bottom of the caquelon, then add the grated or sliced cheese and finally pour the wine.

The specific thin in the Fribourgeoise fondue recipe is that the wine is replaced with water. The fondue set is turned on on a slow fire while stirring periodically until the cheese is completely melted. Then pepper and other supplements are added according to the desired recipe, such as sliced in cubes shallots, morel mushroom, mustard, etc. Corn starch dissolved in a little bit of cherry brandy can be used to thicken and improve consistency in cases where more wine is added, for example, or when the fondue is more liquid.

Sometimes, a little bit of cardamom powder (which improves digestion) or other spices can be poured directly into the plate, where the cheese dipped bite is rolled right before consumption.

Finally, when the fondue is over, it is possible to have dregs or crust of toasted cheese, called “religieuse”, which is removed with a fork, sometimes it is quite difficult.

Also, at the end of the fondue you can add and prepare scrambled eggs.

Main varieties of Swiss cheese fondues

FONDUE CHEESE CONTENT
Moitié–Moitié 50% Gruyére and 50% Vacherin
Fribourgeoise 100% Vacherin Fribourgeois
Appenzelloise 100% Appenzeller
Neuchateloise 50% Gruyére and 50% Emmental
Central Switzerland 1/3 Gruyére, 1/3 Emmental, 1/3 Sbrinz
Savoyard 50% Emmental of Savoy and 50% Beaufort or Comté
Franc-Comtois 100% Comté

Now my deep secret…

I love cheese. Oh I really do. And you know you don’t appreciate things until you live without them. And that is so very true about cheese and China.

Like on hamburgers turning them magically into cheeseburgers. (It’s magical how it works.) You put the cheese on top of the burger after you cooked one side, and then you let the heat from inside the burger melt the cheese on to the paddy. You don’t rely on the heat around the burger to do it. Then you watch the cheese melt. It gets soft at the edges and then starts to wrap around the burger and starts to clutch it like a firm loving embrace.

Ahhh.

Turning hamburgers into cheeseburgers.

And…

As much as the delicious improvements to hamburgers come from cheese, so do improvements in just about anything else. You know like this…

Delicious cheeseburger.

Do you know what is better than thick gooey cheese on top of a cheeseburger? It’s thick gooey cheese inside of a cheeseburger. That’s what.

You know, it’s been years, but I used to make the “pizza burgers”. I would mix pizza sauce with the hamburger meat. Then put a chunk of mozzarella cheese in the middle of the patty and cook it that way. My only problem was that the meat would tend to crumble and resemble a “sloppy Joe” more than a burger. But it tasted oh so good. I’ll tell you what.

What a pizza burger is not…

There are many ideas of what a pizza-burger is. I’m gonna tell you all what it is not…

  • It is not a burger with pizza sauce instead of ketchup.
  • It is not an open bun burger (the top missing) with pepperoni slices.
  • It is not a mini-pizza the size of a hamburger.

And if you try to do an image search on Bing that is what you are going to find.  Sad. So very, very sad.

Not real pizza-burgers.

Nope. A real pizza burger has the burger consisting of meat and pizza sauce, and lots and lots of gooey melted cheese. That’s a pizza burger!

Smunching on a burger, and then enjoying life.

Maybe it’s time to go out and do some shopping. Eh?

Going shopping with Mom.

Moving on

You know that there is one very special thing that would really improve the taste of cheese. Aside from friends, and your favorite pets, and some nice tunes (music). Can you guess what I am thinking about?

Yes. You are right.

Alcohol.

Or, more specifically… wine.

Wine and a cheeseburger. So very delicious.

While I have my thoughts, other people are far better versed in explaining the nuances between the different kinds of wines.

A good hamburger is an indulgence. It is also pretty much always a little decadent, rich and hearty, which makes it a natural match for red wine. Sure, some white wines could work, and lots of sparkling wines too. But come on, let’s drink some red wine with our red meat.

  • A Red wine goes best with a hamburger / cheeseburger. You can tell if it is a red wine by it’s color. Red wine has a red color.

Below are some classic wine styles (and bottle recommendations) that pair with burgers, plus a couple of not-so-classic picks that worked well recently with a variety of burger styles — from a simple Swiss cheeseburger with all-American condiments, to a black-truffle-mayo-and-fried-egg stunner, to a bison burger with cheddar, caramelized onions and wasabi mayo.

I would never suggest a ho-hum wine just because burgers are, at the end of the night, just hot sandwiches with toppings.  With that in mind, only one of these 10 bottles rings up higher than $20. (140 RMB for those of you in China.)

Zinfandel

Not a “white Zinfandel” which is everywhere, but rather a “red Zinfandel”. A red Zinfandel wine is both fruity and spicy. Some fruit aromas such as raspberries, blackberries, cherries, cranberries. And there is a generous sprinkling of cinnamon and black pepper. Depending on the winemaking and ageing methods it undergoes Zinfandel can display a range of secondary and tertiary aromas.

Red Zinfandel Wine Information
The color of a zinfandel wine is deep red, bordering on black. Zinfandel is a spicy, peppery wine, with a hint of fruity flavor – berries or dark cherries are often the taste range. Zinfandel goes well with “typical American” food – pizza, burgers, and steaks. It’s hearty enough to match up with thick red sauces.

Zinfandel is one of the all-time classic burger wines. Big, jammy, juicy and spicy, it’s almost as if it were invented for this most-American of sandwiches.

Cabernet

A Taste of Cabernet Sauvignon | wine.co.za
https://wine.co.za/wine/wine.aspx?WINEID=41057

2021-2-16 · Cabernet Sauvignon is a noble variety red grape - and is usually deep red in colour, full-bodied, with dark fruit flavours. It arose out of an accidental breeding between a red Cabernet Franc and a white Sauvignon Blanc grape plant - which subsequently has become one of the most planted and popular varieties in the red wine world.

There used to be an old television commercial. I forget what was being sold. Maybe it was a Heinz product for “57 Steak Sauce”. Encouraging people to shake a particular steak sauce onto their hamburgers instead of ketchup, the TV advertising campaign went something like this:

"...Is a hamburger made of ground ham? No — it's made of ground steak."

As long as it is not a tannic powerhouse, a California cabernet sauvignon, best friend of the juicy steak, is probably going to be a good match for your burger. It’s got a rich flavor, and when you drink it after a bite of a fine thick, cheesy burger the taste really excels.

Oh, I get goosebumps thinking about it.

A nice Cabernet is my favorite, as well as a fine sweet Shiraz.

Malbec

Taste and Flavor Profile Malbec wines are dry, full-bodied, and exhibit rich, dark fruit nose and flavors like blackberry and red plum. They're juicy and jammy, with notes of vanilla, tobacco, dark chocolate, and oak. With medium acid and moderate levels of tannins, they pair well with food.

What Is Malbec Wine? - The Spruce Eats
www.thespruceeats.com/what-are-malbec-wines-3511186

Argentines love their beef, and they wouldn’t dream of eating one of their famous steaks without a glass of malbec. Naturally, malbec is also a great burger wine, with its velvety plum, blackberry, chocolate and earth.

Rhone varieties

The Rhône, a major river in France, rises in the Alps and flows south to the Mediterranean Sea. This river lends its name to the southern French wine region on its banks, the Rhône Valley, as well as its major AOC, Côtes du Rhône.

The indigenous grape varieties that grow in the region, like Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre, Viognier and Roussanne, are often referred to as Rhône grapes. So, regardless of their place of origin, wines made from these grapes are said to be Rhône-style wines the world over.

Rhone Blend
https://www.tastemonterey.com/rhone=blend
Definition: The Rhone region of France has a delightful selection of red varieties. There are 22 grapes allowed in the Rhone AOC, about half of them red. Most of these varieties are used as secondary blending partners, often comprising less than 10% of the blend. The primary red players of Rhone blends are Syrah, Grenache and Mourvèdre.

Can you imagine not seasoning a hamburger patty with a little bit of salt and black pepper? This is where the Rhone grape varieties come into play, especially the powerful and legendary syrah, which can range from floral to leathery, often with a bite of pepper.

Merlot

Most Merlot wines are thick and full-bodies. It’s sort of the “milkshake” of the wine world. It’s considered to be “heavy”, and if you are not used to it, it will get you drunk faster than the lighter wines. Because of this, you will need to drink it slowly and eat it with some fine beef or mutton.

A Taste of Merlot - wine.co.za
https://cellardirect.co.za/a-taste-of-merlot
The Eikendal Merlot 2017 has an attractive nose that reminds one of forest floor, violets, plums, black berries, cherries and peppery spices. On the palate the wine and full and rounded, with soft tannins and a rich taste of black berries and plums.

With richness and a silky mouthfeel, merlot is sort of the wine equivalent of a milkshake in this pairing scenario — if you consider that some people like the fizz and tang of soda with a burger, and others opt for a mouth-coating chocolate shake.

Here’s a picture where someone went into a White Castle fast-food franchise and got some sliders with their wine.

What a better moment than to think of Harold and Kumar…

Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.

So, here I am enjoying a home made cheese burger. (And no, I did not skimp on the tomatoes, and yes, I do enjoy a nice onion with my burger) and drinking it with a fine local wine; Great Wall. It’s a very reasonably priced good real wine. Basic. Just the way I like it.

And I thought that I would cruse the internet, like I used to back in the mid 1990’s during the Bill Clinton years. Back then I actually believed the “news”. Now I know better.

The state of American “news”

Let me say a few words about the state of “news” in America today…

It sucks.

Yup, that’s pretty much it.

Tell ’em George.

For Shits and Giggles

So, for shits and giggles I visited Free Republic to check out what narratives are being promoted these days.

I used to frequent it excessively. But it’s become the mouthpiece of the hard-right, and no longer stands for anything resembling free discourse. And my being perma-banned pretty much validated that belief. After all, what is more hypicritical than to promote the idea of a “Free Republic” where you can freely experss ideas, and then perma-ban a member because “your ideas and thoughts are not welcome here.”

No longer searching for truth and providing a medium for free exchange of ideas it has become a money making venue which now maintains a niche market that caters to a mixture of old-world-conservatives, war-mongering neocons, and the religious right.

One of the first things you learn once you've been out of the United States for six months or longer is just how absolutely bad the American "news" actually is. It's horrible. They lie, and they distort and they do everything in their power to make you afraid.

I check up on the American media enclaves from time to time so that I don’t go too far off the deep end. (It’s easy to do.) Hard right. Hard left. Mainstream. I mostly just scan the headlines. It tells me all that I need to know.

I try to give equal time to all the “news” venues. They all have soemthing to say. They all are visited by people who are searching. It’s just that they all manipulate to push their own agendas.

I am NOT saying bad things about liberals or conservatives, or moderates or any other flavor. I am saying that there are some seriously ill people with some very little minds, and very big mouths. If not properly corralled they will end up causing all the rest of us to endure some real pain.

Contemporaneous news…

BUCS Sign Brady To 4-Year Contract... 

Michelle Obama considers 'retiring' from public life... 

Rubio sides with Alabama workers in AMAZON union battle...

Bezos invited by Sanders to hearing on income, wealth inequality... 

Congress Leaning Towards Big Tech Breakup...

What the AT&T Split Teaches About Antitrust... 

GOOGLE Faces 'Very Large' EU Advertising Probe, Vestager Says...

Claims MICROSOFT's Stance on News Is Effort to Distract from Hack... 

'NEWSROOM' actress appears to have plagiarized NYTIMES essay... 

Spring forward forever? Push to keep daylight saving time year-round grows... 

UPDATE: 'Historic' snowstorm to pummel Wyoming, Colorado...

'6 FEET'...

'Impossible travel conditions'... 

USA had coldest February in 30 years... 

ISIS creates 'elite new cell of jihadis to carry out attacks on West'... 

Rioters Set Fire to Federal Courthouse in Portland 1 Day after Fencing Removed... 

MYSTERY: Number of twins being born at 'all-time high', researchers say... 

Two-Thirds of Italians Set For Lockdown as Pandemic Worsens... 

Germany declares 'third wave' has begun... 

LA primed for disaster, but virus took it to another level! 

HALF adults infected with virus have symptoms of depression... 

Mexico czar got infected -- then walked through Mexico City... 

EU Governments Push to Relax Ban on Travel From Rest of World... 

Maskless, boozing JETBLUE passenger faces $14,500 FAA fine... 

Latest hotel amenity: Free test... 

And yeah, Free Republic hasn’t changed, it’s still the anti-China crusade running hard and hot, plus the usual fearful articles, and a bunch of shit about anti-vax, anti-5G, anti-social reform, and anti-huawei. It’s anti-everything. Except for guns, walls, and war.

The only thing positive that I can say about it is that the culprits are pretty well brazen. They aren’t hiding their disgust about the rest of the world at all. It’s all pretty open, and well-aired. I’ve got to give them credit for that.

Yeah…

So I went through the first three pages and pulled out a slew of anti-China articles. And guess what? They are all from the same source. I wonder why they are spamming FR so aggressively?

Theyare all from the hard-religious-Right publication The Epoch Times.

What is The Epoch Times?. Dangerous Propaganda ...
https://medium.com/politically-speaking/what-is-the-epoch-times-e8f80d152a6f 

May 15, 2020 · The Epoch Times was started by John Tang in the year 2000 as a Chinese language newspaper. John Tang is a graduate of Georgia Tech who publicly supports the Fulan Gong...

All of the articles came from this singular source.

All of the anti-China articles are from this publication that advocates world war III to bring about global social change. Yeah, not all that different from other dooms-day-cults. Like Heaven’s Gate. Or the Jonestown Massacre in 1978. It’s curious to know that so many American conservatives are willing to listen, follow and fund a lunatic that follows in the same footsteps as the Jim Jones when he lead more than 900  followers to their deaths.

People do not drink the Kool-Aide that is being offered by The Epoch Times. It can lead you down a very dark, and scary, path.

Check out their religious-justified Anti-China war-mongering…

Let’s start here with this one. This one is simple. This article is just a rewording of a Reuters piece to bang-on China. Now the Reuters piece pretty much reports that the FCC is following the already in-place policies of the former Trump Administration. This republishing keeps the narrative alive. Giving the FR readership the idea that the Biden Administration is “keeping the heat on China”.

My comments:

It’s all fun and games for now. Just wait in ten years. When China and Russia tire of all this and the American electronic industry and software industry is under a graduated state of collapse. (Just like every other industry in America over the last few decades.) And then when it is tottering before the big fall, China, Russia and all of Europe pulls the rug out, and performs a “tit for tat” payback.

Oh, you all think that cannot happen?

How about this next article…

This one is a laugh. It’s implying and making statements that the Chinese people are fearful of what is going on and how the government is handing things. At a 93% Chinese approval rating the narrative doesn’t make sense. While I am sure that the local government is very active in Beijing, just as they are here, no one, and I do mean NOBODY is concerned. But the American readership knows none of that.

So they believe these LIES.

  • Beijing Pushes for Door-to-Door COVID-19 Vaccinations, Citizens Worry
    3/13/2021, 9:38:12 AM · by SeekAndFind · 11 replies
    Epoch Times ^ | 03/12/2021 | Alex Wu
    
    Chinese authorities recently launched a door-to-door COVID-19 vaccination program in Chaoyang District, in the capital city of Beijing. Some residents shared their concerns with The Epoch Times over their distrust of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its propaganda about COVID-19 vaccines and the pandemic. Mainland Chinese media reported on March 10 that Beijing’s Chaoyang District began a new door-to-door vaccination program in residential communities and villages. The program is also carried out in five types of places such as government offices, the Central Business District (CBD), industrial parks, business offices, and school campuses. Chaoyang is where international companies, foreign...
    Now of course, all this anti-China narrative makes you think certain things about China. And since there are NO NAMES, and there are NO PICTURES, and there are NO VIDEOS, and no one is willing to provide links to the ACTUAL CHINESE DOCUMENTS, you all just believe what is being told. Yet the actual validity of what you read has as much worth as the ten year old riding the bike down the street.

And this one… it really cracks me up!

  • Nearly Half of Trump Supporters Won’t Take the CCP Virus Vaccine: NPR, PBS, Marist Poll
    3/13/2021, 9:35:04 AM · by SeekAndFind · 94 replies
    Epoch Times ^ | 03/12/2021 | Samuel Allegri
    
    Almost half of former President Trump’s supporters don’t plan to take a CCP virus vaccine according to a poll by NPR, PBS, and Marist. The poll indicates that 47 percent of people who identified themselves as Trump supporters would not want to be vaccinated when the doses became available to them. Upon widening the demographics, the survey found that 41 percent of Republicans would not take the vaccine, compared to only 11 percent of Democrats saying they wouldn’t take it. In total, about two-thirds of Americans polled said that they’ve already taken a vaccine or would take one when they...
    Do you want something funny? Half the Trump supporters won’t take ANY vaccine, let alone one from China. But it’ll be hard for them to get the Chinese vaccine inside of America because it is not being shipped to America.

Uh Duh!

I’ll tell ya, you’ve got to be a fucking brainless morn to actually believe the bullshit that is being peddled in America today.

Here’s another…

  • 3 Deaths in 9 Days After Hongkongers Get China’s Sinovac Vaccine
    3/13/2021, 5:21:07 AM · by SeekAndFind · 12 replies
    Epoch Times ^ | 03/12/2021 | Emma Yu
    
    Since Hong Kong began vaccinating the public with the China’s domestically-produced Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine, CoronaVac, on Feb. 26, three deaths in nine days have increased anxiety about the vaccine’s safety. On March 8, a 71-year-old man in Hong Kong died four days after receiving his vaccine shot. The patient was reported to be in good health before the vaccination. This was the third death in nine days in Hong Kong following a CoronaVac injection. It’s unclear whether the vaccine contributed to the deaths. Authorities have said they are investigating the causes of death. The first known death in Hong Kong...
    This one is simple. This article is just a rewording of a Jimmy Lai piece to bang-on China. He might be behind bars, and probably getting ready for organ harvesting, but his papers and media empire lives on…

…for now.

Hate. Hate. Hate.

And you all wonder why these sources and editors, and writers are being banned off the min platforms?

And here’s a hate spewing nonsense trying to associate the COVID-19 lite with China. You all want to know what these people look like to me…

  • Florida Gov. DeSantis Cancels All CCP Virus Fines Issued by Local Officials
    3/13/2021, 3:15:54 AM · by lightman · 36 replies
    epoch times ^ | 12 March A.D. 2021 | Lorenz Duchamps
    
    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order that will eliminate all fines issued by local government officials over the past year to people and businesses in the state who violated restrictions related to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. The order (pdf) was signed after the Board of Executive Clemency approved DeSantis’s proposal on March 10 to categorically remit all fines related to local government CCP virus restrictions. “I hereby remit any fines imposed between March 1, 2020, and March 10, 2021, by any political subdivision of Florida related to local government COVID-19 restrictions,” DeSantis confirmed in the order,...

It’s all war-mongering antagonistic bullshit. And if left unchecked it will lead to war. And people are gonna die!

Listen to me.

These NEOCONS are Dangerous.

The History of the Neocon Takeover of the USA

Copied as found with editing to fit this venue. It’s a good read and worth your time. All credit to the author.

This is the interview I just did with authors, Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, who have written a definitive 4-part article on the origins and the  history of the Neocon movement. The influence of the Neoconservatives has been catastrophic to the American government – and to much of the world, yet as they point out, it never seems to end. The authors describe it as an elitist cult; a rabid ideology which doesn’t rely on facts to justify itself.

This is the interview I just did with authors, Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, who have written a definitive 4-part article on the origins and the  history of the Neocon movement. The influence of the Neoconservatives has been catastrophic to the American government – and to much of the world, yet as they point out, it never seems to end. The authors describe it as an elitist cult; a rabid ideology which doesn’t rely on facts to justify itself.

Senator J. William Fulbright identified the Neocons’ irrational system for making endless war in Vietnam 45 years ago, in a New Yorker article titled Reflections in Thrall to Fear: “Cold War psychology is the totally illogical transfer of the burden of proof from those who make charges to those who question them”, leading to “The ultimate illogic: war is the course of prudence and sobriety until the case for peace is proved under impossible rules of evidence [or never] – or until the enemy surrenders. Rational men cannot deal with each other on this basis…But these were not rational men and their need to further their irrational quest only increased with the loss of the Vietnam War.”

This same ideology drove the failed War in Iraq – and now, they’re at it again, with their foolhardy saber-rattling towards Russia.

The birth of the Neocon movement grew out of what had previously been known within the Eastern Establishment as “Team B”, in which official policies were tested by “competitive analysis”. The first Team B was created by George H. W. Bush, while he was Director of the CIA. This brought together very unlikely bedfellows, such as the ex-Trotskyite, James Burnham and Right Wing business interests, both of whom lobbied heavily for big military budgets, advanced weapons systems and aggressive action to confront Soviet Communism.

This Team B/Neocon doomsday cult managed to weather the defeat of the Vietnam War and their non-fact-based analyses continue to maintain a stranglehold on US policy.

James Burnham’s nihilist, elitist vision was criticized by George Orwell in his 1946 essay, Second Thoughts on James Burnham, in which he wrote, “What Burnham is mainly concerned to show [in the latter’s book, The Machiavellians] is that a democratic society has never existed and, so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud… Power can sometimes be won and maintained without violence, but never without fraud.” In fact, George Orwell’s classic book, 1984 was based on Burnham’s vision of the coming totalitarian state, which he described as “A new kind of society, neither Capitalist nor Socialist, and probably based upon slavery.”

There are many well-known godfathers of the Neoconservative agenda of “Endless War”, the guiding principle of America’s foreign policymakers today but Gould and Fitzgerald identify James Burnham as by far its most important figure, although he is little-known today.

Burnham was born in Chicago, the son of an English immigrant father. He attended Princeton University and later Oxford University’s Balliol College. He briefly became a close advisor to Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, from whom he learned the tactics and strategies of infiltration, political subversion and dirty tricks. Gould and Fitzgerald note that the Right Wing Neocon cult of “Endless War” is ironically rooted in Trotsky’s permanent “Communist Revolution” and they describe how James Burnham helped to turn this into the permanent battle plan for a global Anglo-American empire. They write, “All that was needed to complete Burnham’s dialectic was a permanent enemy and that would require a sophisticated psychological campaign to keep the hatred of Russia alive for generations.”

In 1941, Burnham renounced his allegiance to Trotsky and Marxist idealism and he moved towards a cruel realism, with his belief in the inevitable failure of democracy and the rise of the oligarch. During the following years, he wrote several books and memos, predicting the rise of a technocratic elite. By 1947, Burnham’s transformation from Communist radical to New World Order American Conservative was complete, landing him smack into the loving arms of America’s Right Wing defense establishment during and after World War II.

In my own writings, I’ve noted that the use of the word “Freedom” by the US Government, whether it be “Freedom Fries”, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” or “They hate us for our freedom,” has completely mangled the significance of this F-word, certainly from a Constitutional perspective. Gould and Fitzgerald trace the bastardization of this word to James Burnham:

“Burnham’s Freedom only applied to those intellectuals (the Machiavellians) willing to tell people the hard truth about the unpopular political realities they faced. These were the realities that would usher in a brave new world of the managerial class who would set about denying Americans the very Democracy they thought they already owned. As Orwell observed about Burnham’s Machiavellian beliefs, in his 1946 Second Thoughts, ‘Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to use the masses.’”

With the CIA’s 1950 founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), Gould and Fitzgerald write, “By its own admission, the CIA’s strategy of promoting the non-Communist Left would become the theoretical foundation of the Agency’s political operations against Communism over the next two decades.”

Today, it appears that this strategy has been a smashing success, where we see the so-called Left in the US playing the role of fulminating, pro-Establishment Statists, a behavior formerly relegated to the Right. Never, in my wildest dreams would I have imagined the “tolerant Left” behaving like an army of Phyllis Schlaflys!

Prior to the catastrophe that was the Vietnam War, the Right was the establishment. The factual defeat of the ideals which drove this war was instrumental to the rise of the 1960s Counterculture movement, which was an even bigger disaster for the Neocons than losing the war. The Counterculture needed to be co-opted by any means necessary and I believe this has been successfully achieved.

Gould and Fitzgerald write that, “CIA’s control over the non-Communist Left and the West’s ‘free’ intellectuals [enabled] the CIA to secretly disenfranchise Europeans and Americans from their own political culture in such a way they would never really know it.”

Gould and Fitzgerald cite historian Christopher Lasch, who wrote in 1969 of the CIA’s co-optation of the American Left: “The modern state… is an engine of propaganda, alternately manufacturing crises and claiming to be the only instrument that can effectively deal with them. This propaganda, in order to be successful, demands the cooperation of writers, teachers, and artists, not as paid propagandists or state-censored time-servers but as ‘free’ intellectuals capable of policing their own jurisdictions and of enforcing acceptable standards of responsibility within the various intellectual professions.”

We see this very much today, in the Late Night comedy of Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah and SNL, the staff writers of which are largely hand-picked from the Harvard Lampoon, where young comedians are trained in a particular brand of comedy that deftly implants a fascist philosophy of extreme elitism and which fuses the ideals of the old Trotskyist left together with those of the right-wing Anglo-American elite, aka the Deep State.

The product of this fusion is called “Neoconservatism” – or its sneaky twin, “Neoliberalism”. The overt mission of this ideology is to roll back Russian influence everywhere. The covert mission is to reassert British cultural dominance over the Anglo-American Empire, maintained through propaganda. Traditionally, comedy has been used as a form of social and political criticism. Today, it cows the hapless consumer into submission to the hegemony.

Gould and Fitzgerald then inform us about the secret Information Research Department of the British and Commonwealth Foreign Office known as the IRD, which was funded by the CIA and served as a covert anti-Communist propaganda unit from 1946 until 1977. Gould and Fitzgerald cite Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, authors of Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, which describes how the IRD spread ceaseless disinformational propaganda (a mixture of lies and distorted facts) among top-ranking journalists working for major news agencies, including Reuters and the BBC and all other available channels. This was but one of many similar initiatives launched by the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board, including Project Mockingbird and the abovementioned Congress for Cultural Freedom.

The mind is the ultimate battlefield. In my next talk with Gould and Fitzgerald, we will go into how the Deep State has designs on our dream life, in such figures as Robert Moss, a former assassin who now gives New Age workshops on “Active Dreaming.” (Incidentally, the New Age Movement was a CIA subproject of MK Ultra mind control programs). The soon-to-be-released 5G network will enable Virtual Reality, as predicted by Gould and Fitzgerald’s book, ‘The Voice: An Encrypted Monologue’, which takes the reader through the process of reclaiming one’s own narrative from the “noize” of unrelenting psychological warfare that saturates our environment.

Check out their book, ‘The Voice’ here:
https://www.forbiddenmedia.com/product/the-voice/

All this neocon “firehose” of disinformation from the hard-right seriously give me a headache. It’s like this…

(Since we are talking about 1994, and the Bill Clinton years of surfing the “web”.)

Oh, and where was I, oh yeah…

Video on the fifth tier cities in China

Let’s move away from the American “news” and let’s see a taste of what real reality actually is.

Here we just provide a video that is making the rounds in China. A fellow from the UK, who lives in China, has been making various You-tube videos of his experiences in China. And you can come across these kinds of videos all over the internet. But what makes this particular video so special is that it isn’t a first or second tier city. He’s making videos in the smaller “back woods” communities within China. It’s the real deal.

You see, most you-tube videos are of expats exploring Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Cool and big cities most certainly. But they are first-tier enormous urban landscapes.  But those of us, like myself, live in the smaller communities.

Here he is visiting some of the “smaller communities”. To an American, or Brit, it looks like a city. To a Chinese person, it is considered a small village. It’s not big and it doesn’t qualify for high speed rail, or subway access. But it is still vibrant and alive as all of China is these days.

Here’s the video. Click on the picture for the video to open up in a new tab. It’s around 12 minutes or so long, and is narrated by a British expat. Please excuse his accent, and his “squirly” appearance. He’s a typical. Don’t you know.

I do hope that you enjoy it. It’s pretty much what it is like when you enter the Chinese version of “Fly over country”, and a “Red State”.

Now, go and get some cheese, a bottle of wine, some music and call up some friends. Time is too short to waste!

Do you want more?

I have more articles in my China experience section. Go here…

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Trump’s international policies have been a complete failure, yet (somehow) we are to believe that Biden will continue with them.

If you believe this narrative, and it is a narrative, then you fit into an entirely new classification for “stupid”.

Elections are how “democracies” get to change direction, policies, laws and rules. There are no other formal ways aside from a Constitutional Convention. And every four years, the citizens of America look at their lives, and their leadership and vote to either continue on the current path or divert from it and go into new directions.

That’s how democracies work.

Yet, the media is flowing with all sorts of articles that says that Biden is going to be a real “war hawk” and that he is not only going to continue with his neocon polices, but become more aggressive with them (as if that is even possible). And this narrative is cropping up here and there, and it is really irritating to me.

Hell.

It makes me want to dust off the old turntable, and put some Lobo on and dream of what might have been. Let me off. This world has gone ape-shit.

Lobo
Lobo from Big Tree Records

.

For those of you who don't know, Lobo was an American music group from the early 1970's. The singer / songwriter was a Florida folk rocker kind of guy. His songs become rather well known with "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo". (travelin' and ah livin' off the land, how I love being a free man.)
Me and you and a Dog Named Boo.

.

Ever since it appeared that Biden might overtake Trump in the election, the entire propaganda machine inside of America (and England) has been spewing forth this narrative…

Of course, this is the narrative that is being fed to the mindless masses; the “Joe Sixpack” in “Flyover country”.

Meanwhile, all the neocon war-loving publications inside of America are horrified that Biden might ease up on the war-stance and instead embrace the idea of co-existence…

Ah yes… not going to war with China is “hysterical”. It is horrific, dangerous and inattentive.

Sure.

What ever you say.

.

Now we are going to talk about Trump

Ugh!

Hey! You just cannot avoid talking about this fellow, he has been President for the last four years, and has been very active in many areas. There are people who love him and who hate him. In fact, I will go as far as to say that he is the most polarizing figure since Hillary Clinton.

And she is VERY polarizing.

So, all you Trump supporters, don’t get all hot and bothered about bad things being said, and that goes double for the Biden supporters. Keep in mind that both Presidents, and all of their minions are but actors. Nothing more. The purpose of this post herein is to take a look at media manipulation of Americans. Just like we did in the earlier post of media manipulation of American views on China.

Just what is this particular neocon publication anyways?

The National Review is a right-leaning, semi-monthly magazine founded by author William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1955. Buckley started the magazine with the goal of making conservative ideas respectable at a time in which he believedliterate America [had] rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation.”

-National Review Media Bias | AllSides

Yeah. They are neocons. These are the folk that cheer on the eight simultaneous wars the USA is fighting today, and who push for mega-expensive military hardware. Fun fact, one “Hellfire” missile is the cost of a hospital. These guys think that having a hundreds of thousands of them…

…isn’t enough.

But boy, oh boy, do they HATE being referred to war-loving neocons…

Anyways…

I think I need a beer. If you, the reader were here with me, I’d buy you all a beer. That’s the truth, and that’s a fact Jack.

Time for a good beer.
It’s time for a beer, you all.

.

I am getting off the subject. Oh yes. So what is all this about? What is going on, why is the American media so geared up to convince Americans that Biden is going to be just like Trump on international matters?

Why?

Hold that thought.

Why do I (and others) defend China?

Yeah. I am swimming up river. It’s just a lone lonely voice out in the wilderness while hundreds, if not thousands, of anti-China articles are being cranked out of the American media machine daily. What the fuck is going on?

Here is a quote from Bill Brodenblock…

…concerning whether he was going to waste his time retorting to some bullshit from the Wall Street Journal.

Right. A well-argued rebuttal will take you much more than a day. There’s a lie, a half-truth or impeachment in every sentence.

No,  it is not worth the effort. They have the resources to produce every day another “article” or “report” on China, again bursting with lies and  fabrications.

They are stronger than we, they have almost unlimited resources and much more experience in making up lies than anyone else.

Their readership is thousands of times more than ours. 
 
A new Global Times poll  in China has shown that over 70 percent of respondents believe that the  "wolf warrior diplomacy" is the diplomatic attitude that China should  take, with 78 percent of interviewees believing that China's global  image has improved in recent years.

The outspoken example of the new Chinese wolf Warrior diplomacy is 赵立坚 (Zhào Lìjiān)  the one of the cartoon, showing the Australian hypocrisy on its war crimes in Afghanistan (Brereton report). 
 
I  became a “Wolf Warrior”, not in the first place because I was living in  China, also not because I feel I should defend China’s legitimate  viewpoints
but because I can’t stand lies. 

I  can’t stand it to see politicians, journalists, teachers or whoever  with some power lying to people, often people who’re helpless and unable  to defend themselves.
 
Both  my grandfathers were in politics; they knew and used all the famous  tricks as so common today in politics. I, as a little boy have seen them  developing their strategies at our kitchen table. My father was a  teacher and a deacon. He strongly disapproved the hypocrisy of his  father and father-in-law. My father taught me that lying is a sin. I  feel lying it is more than just a sin, it is a crime.

My pro-China stances are motivated by my disgust for lies.
 
That’s why I am doing it, not in the first place to help China. 

Nevertheless,  I feel that China, the Chinese government or whoever with some  political power in China, should at least take the effort to send me a  “thank you” or to show some recognition for my efforts. That’s the least  they can do. 
 
Every  day at the local social media, I get the full load of shit over me. In  my meetings at business associations and service-clubs (now often  on-line), there are people who start scolding, some even yelling at me,  just because they know my China viewpoints. Last year, during a  speech/presentation, someone was trying to prevent me from finishing my  presentation. 

It’s not just Bill, don’t you know.

I hate being lied to as well.

And when I think about all the lies, and the deceptions, and the tricks, and “the rug getting pulled out from under my feet” I get really angry. I just want, no NEED, to go out and get a beer.

Drinking at work.
Office party before the fleet of lies out of Washington DC suppressed drinking at work-related events via insurance restrictions.

.

And I hate it even more when others actually believe the lies. Hey! Have you died from “Mad Cow Disease” yet? What about Y2K? What about “Back Masking” on Rock and Roll music? How has that “Domino Theory” panned out?

Domino Theory

The domino theory was a theory prominent in the United States from the 1950s to the 1980s that posited that if one country in a region came under the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would follow in a domino effect. The domino theory was used by successive United States administrations during the Cold War to justify the need for American intervention around the world.

Wikipedia

I hate it when the government is lying so obviously and so blatantly. It just riles up my skivvies.

It makes me want to go to the fridge, pop open a beer and watch some Golden Girls. Anything to get my mind off this bullshit.

The Golden Girls

NBC was already a monster by 1985 thanks to programs like "The Cosby Show", "Cheers" and "L.A. Law" (all part of that unbeatable Thursday lineup). In 1985 it appeared that Beatrice Arthur (who struck gold with "Maude", a spin-off of "All in the Family") was going back to television in a new show called "The Golden Girls". 

Along with Arthur (a smart-mouthed Brooklyn native) was her old-world Sicilian mother (Estelle Getty), a bubble-headed Minnesota native (Betty White) and a sex-crazed belle from Georgia (Rue McClanahan). This quartet of actresses would create the finest core of performers to ever star in a television series. 

"The Golden Girls", unlike "Cheers", was a hit from its first episode. 

It dominated with vigor and spunk on Saturday nights. NBC was worried that the show would never find an audience big enough to make a dent in the ratings, but for a time "The Golden Girls" was as excellent as anything else the networks had to offer. 

The four women, all obviously over 50, lived, laughed and cried together in Miami for nearly a decade from 1985 to 1992. 

The series pushed the envelope on everything that dominated headlines during its run (AIDS, homosexuality, sexism, ageism, political unrest, abortion and an endless list of other topics too long to go into at length). The episodes went for comedy, but usually almost always had a deep meaning to them about love and friendship. 

All four actresses shared the spotlight equally for the most part. 

Arthur and McClanahan had hit gold with "Maude" and White had been along seemingly at the advent of television programming. Getty was relatively unknown, but fit in well with more-established performers immediately (her character got away with more than the others as she was written as a lady who had suffered a major stroke which affected the relationship between what she said and thought). 

Herb Edelman (who made a name for himself in "The Odd Couple") was always a consistent element as Arthur's two-timing ex-husband and Harold Gould (who was a key player in "The Sting") also became a fixture during the series' latter episodes as White's love interest. 

The great thing about this show is that it took a chance by starring four actresses in their mid 50s to 60s and showed that just because you're old, it doesn't mean that life is over and you can't have fun anymore. The humor reaches to all age demographics and the characters each have such distinct, hilarious traits that watching them try to get along is a hoot.
 
If you're a boy or adult man that feels embarrassed to watch this show, DON'T. It's a pure classic that will never be forgotten in my life and will always be one of my favorite shows! This show proves that hilarity doesn't just come from younger folks, but that it can come from older people just as much!!! Long live The Golden Girls!!! 10 out of 10 EASILY!!!
The Golden Girls learn how things were done in “the old country”.

.

Yeah. I get it. I’m too old a fogy to appreciate the new understandings about how Mr. Trump ran things. For he was brilliant.

  • He brought factories back to America… …almost.
  • He built a wall… almost.
  • He put Hillary Clinton in jail … almost.
  • He lowered taxes … not quite, he actually raised them.
  • He balanced the budget … nope. He sent the debit into orbit.
  • He protected the USA… we see how well that is panning out with COVID-19.
  • He made America respected around the world … absolutely NOT.

Not.

Not. Not. Not.

Jeeze Man!

I need a beer.

Drinking beer with the girls.
You need a beer to slug through all the bullshit that exists int he USA today.

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America today is terribly disrespected around the world. And I attribute it to Donald Trump and his inability to master the prerequisite laws of power necessary for his position as President of the United States.

What do I mean?

I mean this…

The 48 Laws of Power

To best understand my point of view as to why his international policies stank you need to learn the basics of the laws of power. This is especially true in global politics. Consider the following laws that Trump routinely violated.

For starters, he violated Law #3.

3. Conceal your intentions.

Keep people  off-balance and in the dark by never revealing the purpose behind your  actions. If they have no clue what you are up to, they cannot prepare a  defense. Guide them far enough down the wrong path, envelop them in  enough smoke, and by the time they realize your intentions, it will be  too late.

I: Use decoyed objects of desire and red herrings to throw people off the scent:

If  at any point in the deception you practice people have the slightest  suspicions to your intentions, all is lost. Do not give them the chance  to sense what you are up to: Throw them off the scent by dragging red  herrings across the path. Use false sincerity, send ambiguous signals,  set up misleading objects of desire. Unable to distinguish the genuine  from the false, they cannot pick out your real goal.

Hide your intentions not by closing up, but by talking endlessly about your desires and goals - just false ones.

II: Use smoke screens to disguise your actions:

Deception  is always the best strategy, but the best deceptions require a screen  of smoke to distract people attention from your real purpose. The bland  exterior—like the unreadable poker face—is often the perfect smoke  screen, hiding your intentions behind the comfortable and familiar. If  you lead the sucker down a familiar path, he won’t catch on when you  lead him into a trap.

A helpful or honest gesture can divert from a deception.
Patterns will also help mask a deception.
Often the key to deception is being bland and acting with humility.

When you conceal your intentions, you can allow others to drop down their guard. They don’t groan and say “oh, it’s that Donald Trump again”. You don’t say “I demand that you do this or I will bloody well blow the shit out of you”.

Geeze!

I really do need a beer.

1960's decor.
Times have changed, but humans haven’t.

He violated Law #4.

4. Always say less than necessary. 

When  you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more  common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying  something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended,  and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less.  The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.

Silence generally makes people uncomfortable - they will jump in and nervously fill the silence.

Generally saying less makes you appear more profound and mysterious.
Be particularly careful with sarcasm - rarely is it valuable.
Be careful with arousing suspicion or insecurity by being silent.  At times it is easier to blend by playing the jester.

Donald Trump was never the one to keep his mouth shut. I think that many Americans grew weary (though obviously not everyone) and tired of the 70 tweets per night, and the horror of waking up to find yet another contract torn up and more discord and chaos.

Party.
Christmas Party at the office, 1970’s style.

He violated law #18.

18. Do not build fortresses to protect yourself - isolation is dangerous.

The  world is dangerous and enemies are everywhere—everyone has to protect  themselves. A fortress seems the safest. But isolation exposes you to  more dangers than it Protects you from—it cuts you off from valuable  information, it makes you conspicuous and an easy target. Better to  circulate among people, find allies, mingle. You are shielded from your  enemies by the crowd.

Retreat to a fortress and you lose contact with your sources of power, and your knowledge of what is going on.
If you need time to think, then choose isolation as a last resort, and only in small doses.

That was the sole primary element in the MAGA plan; to Make America Great Again; it was to isolate America from all foreign trade, build a wall around it, and then just attack all non-Americans everywhere. In addition, kick all Chinese out of the country, ban all Chinese applications, and if possible sink all Chinese ships.

I mean when you are on a roll… you are on a roll.

On a roll.
When you are on a roll, you are on a roll.

He violated Law #19.

19. Know who you’re dealing with - do not offend the wrong person.

There  are many different kinds of people in the world, and you can never  assume that everyone will react to your strategies in the same way.  Deceive or outmaneuver some people and they will spend the rest of their  lives seeking revenge. They are wolves in lambs’ clothing. Choose your  victims and opponents carefully, then—never of fend or deceive the wrong  person.

Being able to recognize the type of person you’re dealing with is critical. Here are the five most dangerous:

The Arrogant and Proud Man: any perceived slight will invite vengeance.  Flee these people.

The Hopelessly Insecure Man: similar  to the proud man, but will take revenge in smaller bites over time.  Do  not stay around him if you have harmed or deceived him.

Mr. Suspicion: sees the worst in others and imagines that everyone is after him.  Easy to deceive - get him to turn on others.

The Serpent with a Long Memory: if  hurt, he will show no anger, but will calculate and wait. Recognize by  his calculation and cunning in other areas of life - he is usually cold  and unaffectionate.  Crush him completely or flee.

The Plain, Unassuming, and Often Unintelligent Man: this  man will not take the bait because he does not recognize it. Do not  waste your resources trying to deceive him.  Have a test ready for a  mark - a joke, a story. If reaction is literal, this is the type you are  dealing with.
Never rely on instincts when judging someone; instead gather concrete knowledge.  Also never trust appearances.
Drinking and partying.
Perhaps if Trump drank alcohol, he would be more open and sensitive to how his actions affected others. But he seems to be completely and totally oblivious to it.

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He violated law #24.

24. Play the perfect courtier.

The  perfect courtier thrives in a world where everything revolves around  power and political dexterity. He has mastered the art of indirection;  he flatters, yields to superiors, and asserts power over others in the  most oblique and graceful manner. Learn and apply the laws of  courtiership and there will be no limit to how far you can rise in the  court.

The Laws of Court Politics

Avoid Ostentation: modesty is always preferable.

Practice Nonchalance: never  appear to be working too hard; your talent must appear to flow  naturally, with ease.  Showing your blood and toil is a form of  ostentation.

Be Frugal with Flattery: flatter indirectly by being modest.

Arrange to be Noticed: pay attention to your appearance, and find a way to create a subtly distinctive style and image.

Alter Your Style and Language According to the Person You’re Dealing With: acting the same with all will be seen as condescension by those below you, and offend those above you.

Never Be the Bearer of Bad News: the messenger is always killed.  Bring only glad news.

Never Affect Friendliness and Intimacy with Your Master: he does not want a friend for a subordinate.

Never Criticize Those Above You Directly: err on the side of subtlety and gentleness.

Be Frugal in Asking Those Above You for Favours: it is always better to earn your favours.  Do not ask for favours on another person’s behalf.

Never Joke About Appearances or Taste

Do Not Be the Court Cynic: express admiration for the good work of others.

Be Self-Observant: you must train yourself to evaluate your own actions.

Master Your Emotions

Fit the Spirit of the Times: your spirit and way of thinking must keep up with the times, even if the times offend your sensibilities.

Be a Source of Pleasure: if you cannot be the life of the party, at least obscure your less desirable qualities.

Yes. Like him, love him or hate him, Mr. Trump was certainly unique. Most Americans, trapped within the media and informational bubble there, were never given insight to his faults. Only endless praises and glory. He, in a way, had a following that rivaled both Bill Clinton, and Barrack Obama, and at that you MUST give him credit.

You just MUST.

He, like Bill Clinton, is a master manipulator.

Outside th echo chamber.
But those of us who sit outside of the American echo-chamber tend to have a different point of view.

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He violated law #43.

43. Work on the hearts and minds of others.

Coercion  creates a reaction that will eventually work against you. You must  seduce others into wanting to move in your direction. A person you have  seduced becomes your loyal pawn. And the way to seduce others is to  operate on their individual psychologies and weaknesses. Soften up the  resistant by working on their emotions, playing on what they hold dear  and what they fear. Ignore the hearts and minds of others and they will  grow to hate you.

Remember: The key to  persuasion is softening people up and breaking them down, gently. Seduce  them with a two-pronged approach: Work on their emotions and play on  their intellectual weaknesses. Be alert to both what separates them from  everyone else (their individual psychology) and what they share with  everyone else (their basic emotional responses). Aim at the primary  emotions—love, hate, jealousy. Once you move their emotions you have  reduced their control, making them more vulnerable to persuasion.

Play  on contrasts: push people to despair, then give them relief. If they  expect pain and you give them pleasure, you win their hearts.

Symbolic gestures of self-sacrifice can win sympathy and goodwill.

The quickest way to secure people’s minds is by demonstrating, as simply as possible, how an action will benefit them.

All this talk about politics, manipulation and likes makes me want to drink. And drinking makes me hungry.

NY Pizza.
Some New York style pizza would really hit the spot.

And the laws that he actually used…

To be fair, President Trump DID actually follow certain rules of power. And he does deserve full credit for that. Don’t you know.

His entire presidency was Law #17.

17. Keep others in suspended terror: cultivate an air of unpredictability.

Humans  are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in  other people’s actions. Your predictability gives them a sense of  control. Turn the tables: Be deliberately unpredictable. Behavior that  seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance, and  they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves. Taken to an  extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize.

Unsettle those around you and keep the initiative by being unpredictable.
Predictability and patterns can be used as a tool when deceiving.

As well as… Law #27.

27. Play on people’s need to believe to create a cult like following.

People  have an overwhelming desire to believe in something. Become the focal  point of such desire by offering them a cause, a new faith to follow.  Keep your words vague but full of promise ; emphasize enthusiasm over  rationality and clear thinking. Give your new disciples rituals to  perform, ask them to make sacrifices on your behalf. In the absence of  organized religion and grand causes, your new belief system will bring  you untold power.

How to create a cult in 5 easy steps:

Keep It Vague, Keep it Simple: use  words to attract attention, with great enthusiasm.  Fancy titles for  simple things are helpful, as are the use of numbers and the creation of  new words for vague concepts.  All of these create the impression of  specialized knowledge. People want to hear there is a simple solution to  their problems.

Emphasize the Visual and the Sensual over the Intellectual: Boredom  and skepticism are two dangers you must counter.  The best way to do  this is through theatre, creating a spectacle.  Appeal to all the  senses, and use the exotic.

Borrow the Forms of Organized Religion to Structure the Group: create  rituals, organize followers into hierarchy, rank them in grades of  sanctity, give them names and titles, ask them for sacrifices that fill  your coffers and increase your power.  Talk and act like a prophet.

Disguise Your Source of Income: make your wealth seem to come from the truth of your methods.

Set Up an Us-Versus-Them Dynamic: first  make sure your followers believe they are part of an exclusive club,  unified by common goals.  Then, manufacture the notion of a devious  enemy out to ruin you.

People are not interested in the truth  about change - that it requires hard work - but rather they are dying to  believe something romantic, otherworldly.
The most effective cults mix religion with science.

I’m out of beer, and I need to drain the lizard.

Hold on.

Doesn’t all this make you hungry? It does me. That’s for certain.

Delicious hamburger.
A hamburger might be nice.

Where he has indeed… Law #32.

32. Play to people’s fantasies.

The  truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal  to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes  from disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who  can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the  desert: 

Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into  the fantasies of the masses.

Never promise a  gradual improvement through hard work; rather, promise the moon, the  great and sudden transformation, the pot of gold.

The key to  fantasy is distance - the distance has allure and promise, seems simple  and problem free.  What you are offering, then, should be ungraspable.  Never let it become oppressively familiar.
My speed in food.
I think that this is more my speed. Seriously.

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And who can forget his amazing MAGA rallies? Law #32.

37. Create compelling spectacles.

Striking  imagery and grand symbolic gestures create the aura of power—everyone  responds to them. Stage spectacles for those around you, then, full of  arresting visuals and radiant symbols that heighten your presence.  Dazzled by appearances, no one will notice what you are really doing.

Words often go astray, but symbols and the visual strike with emotional power and immediacy.

Find an associate yourself with powerful images and symbols to gain power.
Most  effective of all is a new combination - a fusion of images and symbols  that have not been seen together before, but that clearly demonstrate  your new idea, message, religion.

Um…

Brilliant?

Hardly.

Like I said. I need a beer.

Time for a beer with some friends.
I say that it is time for a beer.

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Let’s pause on the “why is the news media so focused on Biden continuing Trumps policies”, and take a look at what I mean when I say that his international polices stink.

For after all NO ONE in the USA thinks that his international policies were bad.

Americans gleefully accepted a 25% increase in the price of almost all manufactured products. Not a peep from the serfs. And of course, FOX and El’ Rushbo were absolutely gleeful in every action that he took.

But functionally… yeah. His international policies stank.

Trumps international policies

Yes his international policies stunk. No, I take that back, they were an unmitigated disaster. But you all don’t need to believe me. Check out this opinion…

He has cozied up to right-wing nationalist dictators and autocrats at  a moment when citizens of faltering democracies and the many peoples  around the world aspiring to freedom most need an advocate on the  international stage.

He has rejected  the honorable American presidential tradition of seeking unity and  instead has indulged in the politics of division, willfully alienating a  large segment of the American electorate while among his own supporters  drumming up hatred for and suspicion of others.

He has  transformed the White House, which should promote policies based on  reality, into the world capital of ignorance, dishonesty and  misinformation by reciting verifiable falsehoods, from the size of his  inauguration crowd to the direction of a hurricane to the (disproven)  prevalence of election fraud.

He has been a particular antagonist  to California, seeking to undermine this state’s forward-looking  policies on auto emissions and environmental preservation, spreading  falsehoods about the causes of its deadly wildfires, disparaging its  rational and humane approach to immigration challenges, demeaning it for  its struggles to deal with homelessness, and offering instead purported  solutions that are unworkable, nonsensical or cruel.

He has denied the existential challenge of climate change and has  promulgated policies that weaken the nation’s role in fighting it and  scuttle the nation’s ability to take economic leadership in low-emission  and carbon-capturing technology.

He has made the United States  unreliable, erratic and foolish in international affairs by disparaging  its diplomatic corps, engaging in frequent and jarring changes in  foreign affairs and defense advisors and repudiating international  allies and partners.
                            
Trump has cheapened his office, instilled  distrust in essential institutions of justice and democracy and replaced  knowledge and professionalism with ignorance and amateurism.                
 
He has made light of verified Russian assaults on U.S. elections, and  at his notorious and shameful Helsinki news conference last year said  he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin over his own nation’s  intelligence agencies. 

He failed to elicit from the Russian leader an  apology for past intervention or a promise not to intervene in other  elections. In so doing, he invited further, more comprehensive attacks —  and failed in the most basic duty of any U.S. president, which is to  protect and defend the United States.

He has reduced or eliminated independent science advisory panels in a  quest to remove fact from policymaking when it collides with damaging  policies he wishes to pursue.

He has demeaned the presidency with  foul, angry language hurled at his political adversaries, replacing  fireside chats and presidential addresses with  cable-TV-fueled,  stream-of-consciousness tweets that attack his critics and stoke fear  and outrage in his supporters.

He has undercut the nation’s moral  standing by his shrugging response to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi at  the hands of Saudi operatives.

He has sullied the office of the  presidency by using it to express his personal contempt for people he  does not like or who do not support him. The most egregious example may  be his treatment of Sen. John McCain, a much-decorated former Vietnam  War prisoner whose honor Trump questioned even after McCain’s passing.

He has appealed to the basest part of our culture, lifting into the  mainstream chords and currents of racism that had long been left to  fester in only our darkest corners. He commented on the deadly white  nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., with an equivocating speech  that shrank from condemning violent racism and promoted false  equivalency among demonstrators for and against white supremacy. He put  in place a program to deny visas to visitors from majority Muslim  nations. He disparaged Latinos; called Haiti, El Salvador and African  nations “shithole countries”; and expressed his preference for  immigrants from Norway. He promoted the notion that one’s American-ness  is a function of descent and not birth or naturalization, by saying  U.S.-born members of Congress should “go back” to the countries “from  which they came.” He has issued statements that in the aggregate define  an America united not by law, the Constitution, liberty or justice but  by racial heritage.

More than any president in living memory,  Trump has cheapened his office, instilled distrust in essential  institutions of justice and democracy and replaced knowledge and  professionalism with ignorance and amateurism. This partial list  represents a mere slice of what makes Donald Trump unacceptable as  president of the United States and what makes it of utmost importance  that Americans of all political parties and positions reject and replace  him.

-LA Times

Of course, that is just someone’s opinion.

I like to think that he meant well. That he tried, he really tried.

It’s just that his ideas are from another time, an outdated time, when nations ruled by paper and separated by cultural differences fought over swatches of rock and desert. But that age is long gone. This is a new age, and for the human species to propagate and grow we need to discard those childish ideas behind and accept that we are all biologically the same. That we are not different. And that fighting over territory, or advantage is a undesirable pursuit.

Times have changed.

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For one thing, I was fighting for Trump. I really wanted him to stop that Obama trademark of non-stop progressive social re-engineering. I was tired of all the bullshit, and the people being forced to bake cakes against their beliefs, and other such nonsense. I wanted it to STOP. And you know what?

It did.

What’s more, I wanted factories to return to America, and people to start working again, and all that nonsense about HR Diversity officers to go away, and cheaper affordable health care to return (yes, return to pre-1980 levels).

They didn’t.

But you know, I wasn’t inside of America when he was the reigning head honcho. I was outside of America. I was sitting on the front row watching him represent the United States to the rest of the world. And precious little of what he did was covered by the American domestic press.

He was a God-damn train wreck.

In hindsight, it is no wonder that Trump was gloating that 2020 would be a “banner year” for America, and that there would be victories abound. His plans, were they to manifest would have put America back on top, and the rest of the world opposition crippled for decades to come. Even though…

People! 2020 was the year that the USA was to destroy China, first by starvation and internal revolution, then by biological weapons, and finally by military confrontation on the Chinese shores. The only reason why American cites are not radioactive ruins right now is because the Chief of Staff of the Defense department disobeyed his orders to attack China in the Summer of 2020 with the mega-flotilla of aircraft carriers.

Ah, but no one is talking about that.

Nor are they talking about his plan to destroy China through starvation with eight (x8) types of selective biological weapons targeting crops and livestock, some of which (in the more remote areas) were deployed by drones, and then a full-on assault on the Chinese people (a nation four times larger than the United States) by COVID-19B, and having Americans get “herd Immunity” though COVID-19A. With a follow up with the far more lethal vomit-to-death virus unleashed in October 2020. No wonder Trump pretended to get sick while scurrying to the airborne command post when the Chinese PLA discovered and isolated the virus..

How’s that all working out you-all?

No one is talking about that.

Of course not.

Americans know (after four years of propaganda) that China is vile and evil, and that 5G technology is bad, and that the world would be a better place if China were completely and utterly destroyed due to the superiority of American “democracy”.

American NEEDS the rest of the world to adopt the “great American way of life“. So that everyone can enjoy that great delicious, lip-smacking “democracy” and American “way of life” like this lithe young lass does.

American NEEDS the rest of the world to adopt the "great American way of life".
American NEEDS the rest of the world to adopt the “great American way of life“.

But, seriously, how has President Trump’s international policies been?

Well, if you read the conservative websites, Trump has been almost God-like. He has single-handedly made America strong (again), stopped terrorism in it’s tracks, built walls around America to keep out bad guys, and almost put Hillary Clinton in Jail. To some, his tenure as President has been a resounding success.

But to others, his international actions have been a fiasco. Most people don’t want to hear about it. But it is true…

Climate

Most conservatives do not believe in “climate change” or that humans have a responsibility to shepherd and manage our natural resources. Instead, they believe that while there are limits, they are near infinite in practicality, and thus all the issues about care for the earth is yet another way to skim money out of the pockets of Americans.

Well, both sides are right and both sides are wrong. But that doesn’t matter. What we are talking about here is the Trump policies concerning climate regarding international treaties.

Since the Trump administration took office, it has been fighting what they call an “anti-growth” agenda put in place by the Obama administration. Regulations that required businesses to spend time and money to meet the former administration’s environmental standards were swiftly reviewed and, in many cases, rolled back.

States, municipalities, and NGOs have responded to these changes by filing lawsuits to block the administration. Some, like lawsuits against the Keystone XL pipeline, have successfully kept public land closed to additional development.

This aspect of his policies has been covered substantially by National Geographic Magazine.

Clean air

1. U.S. pulls out of Paris Climate Agreement

This is perhaps the decision that set the tone for the Trump administration’s approach to the environment: when he moved to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement in June of 2017. To many, it signaled less U.S. leadership in international climate change agreements. (Read more about this decision.)

2. Trump EPA poised to scrap clean power plan

The Clean Power Plan was one of the Obama’s signature environmental policies. It required the energy sector to cut carbon emissions by 32 percent by 2030, but in October 2017 it was rolled back by Trump’s EPA. Among the reasons cited were unfair burdens on the power sector and a “war on coal.” (Read more on why Trump can’t make coal great again.)

3. EPA loosens regulations on toxic air pollution

This regulation revolved around a complicated rule referred to as “once in, always in” or OIAI. Essentially, OIAI said that if a company polluted over the legal limit, they would have to match the lowest levels set by their industry peers and they would have to match them indefinitely. By dropping OIAI, the Trump EPA forces companies to innovate ways to decrease their emissions, but once those lower targets are met, they’re no longer required to keep using those innovations. (Read more about air pollution.)

4. Rescinding methane-flaring rules

Under the Affordable Clean Energy rule issued in August 2018, states were given more power over regulating emissions. In states like California, that means regulations would likely be stricter, whereas states that produce fossil fuels are likely to weaken regulations. The following month, the EPA announced they would relax rules around releasing methane flares, inspecting equipment, and repairing leaks. (Read more about methane.)

5. Trump announces plan to weaken Obama-era fuel economy rules

Under the Obama administration’s fuel economy targets, cars made after 2012 would, on average, have to get 54 miles per gallon by 2025. In August 2018, the Trump Department of Transportation and EPA capped that target at 34 miles per gallon by 2021. The decision created legal conflict with states like California that have higher emission caps. (Read more about speed bumps in the way of super-efficient cars.)

Water

6. Trump revokes flood standards accounting for sea-level rise

In August 2017, President Trump revoked an Obama-era executive order that required federally funded projects to factor rising sea levels into construction. However, in 2018, the Department of Housing and Urban Development required buildings constructed with disaster relief grants do just that. (Read more about how rising sea levels may imperil the internet.)

7. Waters of the U.S. Rule revocation

What are the “waters of the U.S.?” President Trump issued an executive order in 2017 ordering the EPA to formally review what waters fell under the jurisdiction of the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers according to the 1972 Clean Water Act. The proposed change narrowed the definition of what’s considered a federally protected river or wetland. (Read more about Trump’s plans to roll back the Clean Water Act.)

Wildlife

8. NOAA green lights seismic airgun blasts for oil and gas drilling

Five companies were approved to use seismic air gun blasts to search for underwater oil and gas deposits. Debate over the deafening blasts stem from concerns that they disorient marine mammals that use sonar to communicate and kill plankton. The blasts were shot down by the Bureau of Energy Management in 2017 but approved after NOAA found they would not violate the Marine Mammal Protection Act. (Read more about how scientists think seismic air guns will harm marine life.)

9. Interior Department relaxes sage grouse protection

The uniquely American sage grouse, a bird resembling a turkey with spiked feathers, has become the face of the debate between land developers and conservationists. In both 2017 and 2018, the Trump administration Department of Interior eased restrictions on activities like mining and drilling that had been restricted to protect the endangered bird. (Read more about how the sage grouse become caught in the fight over who owns America’s west.)

10. Trump officials propose changes to handling the Endangered Species Act

In July of 2018, the Trump administration announced its intention to change the way the Endangered Species Act is administered, saying more weight would be put on economic considerations when designating an endangered animal’s habitat. (Read more about the rollbacks facing endangered animals.)

11. Migratory Bird Treaty Act reinterpretation

Companies installing large wind turbines, constructing power lines, or leaving oil exposed are no longer violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act if their activities kill birds. This controversial change was declared by the Trump administration in December of 2017. (Read more about why legally protecting birds is important.)

Opening public lands for business

12. Trump unveils plan to dramatically downsize two national monuments

Unlike national parks, which have to be approved by Congress, national monuments can be created by an executive order, which the president said means they can be dismantled just as easily. Such was the case for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, which President Trump reduced and opened for mining and drilling companies in 2017. Tribes and environmental groups are challenging that interpretation in court. (Read more about the impacts of downsizing these two monuments.)

13. Executive order calls for sharp logging increase on public lands

Just a day before the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, President Trump issued an executive order that called for a 30 percent increase in logging on public lands. The decision was billed as wildfire prevention, though environmental groups say it ignores the role climate change plays in starting wildfires. (Read more about California’s historic wildfires.)

Security & Enforcement

14. Trump drops climate change from list of national security threats

The Trump administration’s decision to delist climate change from national security threats in December of 2017 meant less Department of Defense research funding and a nationalistic viewpoint on the potential impacts of wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and other natural disasters. (Read more about how climate change is forcing migration in Guatemala.)

15. EPA criminal enforcement hits 30-year low

The size and influence of the EPA has shrunk under the Trump administration, and it’s illustrated by their diminished prosecuting power. Criminal prosecutions are at a 30-year low, and many violations that would have been prosecuted in the past are now being negotiated with companies. The administration says this is streamlining its work, but environmentalists have warned it could lead to more pollution. (Read more about the scientists pushing back against President Trump’s environment agenda.)

But it’s more than that…

Donald Trump does not have a foreign policy; he has moods regarding international affairs. Underneath the volatility of his moods, however, are some convictions:

  • That other countries are robbing the U.S. through trade;
  • U.S. allies are at best incapable of defending themselves.
  • Our allies are unwilling to spend resources in order to do so;
  • multilateralism is for the weak.

In many respects, these convictions are fundamentally wrong: over the long term, the U.S. has benefited enormously from …

  • A commitment to open trade,
  • From alliances beyond immediate transactional quid-pro-quo,
  • A multilateral international order,
  • U.S. global power projection.

The real tragedy of Trump’s inability to recognize these facts is the negative consequences that his failed foreign affairs beliefs and choices frequently have for those affected by them.

It makes me want to eat, and drink…

It makes me want to go away, far away from all this nonsense.

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Trump simply makes a lot of bad foreign policy decisions that hurt everyone from U.S. domestic consumers to businesses with international supply chains to leaders of U.S. allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific.

And for some foreign policy decisions—such as the abrogation of the Iran deal, or engagement with North Korea—the jury is still out. We still do not know how those decisions will pan out, and whether or not they are good or bad.

Nonetheless, occasionally, Trump’s convictions feed instincts leading him to decisions that are fundamentally right. Ironically, however, even when Trump makes ostensibly good foreign policy choices, he executes them so badly, or approaches them from such a chaotic and skewed vantage point, that even those who normally would support the policy in question end up obliged to reject it.

A cursory examination of three of Trump’s major international priorities— [1] relationships with allies, [2] the war in Syria, and [3] U.S.-China trade relations—is indicative of this incongruous dynamic.

[1] Trump’s Treatment of Allies

Arguably, the most enduring of Trump’s foreign policy blunders will be his alienation of U.S. allies, particularly in Europe. He has alienated everyone.

Trump is not viewed with favor on the international scene.
Trump is not viewed with favor on the international scene.

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It’s one thing to raise some long-overdue points about the commitment of allies, but it is another thing to be insulting to them, to cause them to lose face, and to create havoc . His rhetorical antagonism and extortionate attempts to compel their increased defense spending (both on burden-sharing and purchases of U.S. technology) portend a change to less cohesion and more conflict between the U.S. and its allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific.

This behavior is pushing forward a new normal in which the U.S. and its allies consider themselves to have different approaches to international affairs and fewer overlapping interests.

This is dangerous for U.S. security, as the U.S. National Defense Strategy identifies the U.S. alliance network as an asymmetric strategic advantage vis-à-vis competitors such as China or Russia.

If abandonment fears on the part of the U.S.’s European and Indo-Pacific allies could be leveraged for greater alliance investment and strengthening in the long run, then some pressure would make sense.

But Trump has undermined this potential outcome by going too far:

  • By stoking right-wing, illiberal nationalism in European states’ domestic politics;
  • Fundamentally calling into question NATO,
  • And questioning the EU, and U.S. commitment to Indo-Pacific hub-and-spoke allies;
  • Browbeating and humiliating European and Asian allies.
  • And failing to acknowledge the strategic advantages that U.S. basing rights overseas represent for U.S. global power projection.

Moreover, Trump seems to misunderstand basic facts about alliance burden-sharing (both multilateral and bilateral) and couples his distaste for alliances with a general destabilization of the international order.

Yet, for all that, his instinct that U.S. allies—particularly in NATO—should meet their defense funding obligations (such as the 2% of GDP threshold for NATO countries) is a good one…

… it is one that is supported by many defense and security experts both in the U.S. and internationally.

The open hostility of his rhetoric and the malformed reasoning behind extortionate demands (such as the recently unveiled “Cost plus 50” concept) weaken the persuasiveness of the serious voices who have pushed (and continue to push) for greater commitment from U.S. allies.

At the very least, it makes allied advocates for greater defense spending seem aligned with a U.S. president who apparently does not care about the interests of allied states.

This dynamic hurts their public credibility.

At worst, it undermines these voices’ ability to broker political deals necessary to overcome headwinds on an issue that is sensitive throughout Europe and the Indo-Pacific.

[2] Trump’s Withdrawal Decision

If you want to withdraw from the world stage, then do it. And initially it looked like that was exactly what Trump was doing. And then he started to expand the global military presence. It was confusing and confounding.

There are many good arguments for why the U.S. should not have an armed forces presence in Syria, and thus why Trump should withdraw U.S. troops from that war-ravaged land. To begin with, Trump campaigned on the promise to leave Syria, and a (small) majority of the U.S. population supports the withdrawal policy.

There is also little evidence that the U.S. military role in the country has led to better security outcomes for Syria.

American military in Syria.
American military in Syria.

.

As many have argued from the political right, left, and center (as well as from both realist and institutionalist perspectives), U.S. military participation in the Syrian conflict [1] arguably violates international law, [2] is unconstitutional under U.S. law, [3] remains hampered by undefined goals, and [4] has not successfully advanced core U.S. strategic interests (indeed there are legitimate arguments that it undermines U.S. security).

A cynic might even argue that the best strategy for the U.S. in Syria would simply be to let U.S.’s enemies—Iran, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, Islamic State and sundry terrorist organizations, Russia, etc.—kill each other. And yet, despite there being a relatively sizable group against the U.S. presence in Syria, Trump botched the withdrawal decision.

The announcement was precipitous and made without either U.S. inter-agency review or meaningful consultation with U.S. allies.

  • Nor was the decision supported by sound strategic or political reasoning; rather, it was sold on the basis of patent lies about the status of defeat of the Islamic State. Indeed, ISIS carried out a lethal attack shortly after Trump’s announcement of the organization’s defeat.
  • As if these self-inflicted wounds to Washington’s reliability and credibility weren’t bad enough, Trump apparently reached the decision after being dubiously convinced by discussions over the phone with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

A man whose ulterior motive is clearly not to finish off elements of remaining terrorist groups in the region (thereby aiding the U.S. in the war on terror)…

… and much less to provide for regional stability…

… but rather to weaken, and, if possible, destroy the U.S.’s Kurdish allies.

  • To boot, Trump’s decision to pull out of Syria cost him his Defense Secretary, James Mattis, for whom the policy changes were the last straw.
Given their deteriorated relationship, Trump probably considered Mattis’s resignation a blessing. 

But for most experts and allied governments, it was unsettling to see him leave, not only because of his reputation as the last, preeminent “adult at the table” in Trump’s cabinet, but also because, of all things, Mattis left in protest of a failed policy, thus slightly tarnishing his sterling image as the wise warrior-monk.

In the end, this group even undermined partially the withdrawal decision, as both National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo walked back parts of the withdrawal commitment during their visits to the Middle East in early 2019.

Regarding Syria, rather than a well thought-out planned withdraw, the decision was conducted on a whim and implemented without any foresight. This kind of decision is what has historically caused nations to collapse, invasions to occur, and people to riot.

[3] The Trade War fiasco

I have written about this in great depth.

As for China, Trump’s instinct to confront it as a strategic competitor is an overdue corrective to the West’s negligence in realizing that China is a rising power.

But how he has dealt with this matter has been catastrophic.

Yet, a trade war, which Trump imagines will solve the U.S.-China trade imbalance, is not the right answer to these issues.

  • The fact that many economists do not believe the U.S. trade deficit with China is a problem in the first place.
  • In fact, trade wars to repair trade deficits do not lead to progress on structural issues.

Economists disagree about many items of their discipline. However, they are almost uniformly united in the belief that trade wars cause deadweight losses that make all belligerents poorer.

  • The tariff-based trade war with China only acts as a tax on U.S. businesses and consumers.
  • It has also caused disruption in global supply and production chains.
  • It has caused instability in global markets.
  • It has fundamentally created a weakening of the free trade norm that underpinned U.S. economic strength.

And so far, China has hardly budged on “structural reform“, as U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer recently conceded. But they don’t need to implement any changes to their government, their society or their inherent way of life. China is not what the neocons think it is, much to America’s chagrin. China is doing splendidly.

Why throw away your cut of prime steak and eat dog food instead?

.

It’s not a popular view point, but that is because 99% of Americans haven’t a clue as to how backwards, and repressed that they have become. Further that they have absolutely no idea of what China is, how it works, or what the Chinese people think.

  • Americans think that the Chinese are poor, downtrodden and living in a repressive / suppressive horrible dark and gloomy place. And that America represents the best place in the world.

But…

  • The Chinese are happy with their government, their way of life, and view America as a crazy place that is fat, unhealthy and rather dumbed down.

Anyone who counters with the crazy (well, insane) idea that China NEEDS to make substantive changes to their government; “structural reform“, a very successful one at that, seriously needs their fucking head fixed.

If you are driving a Porsche 911, you aren’t going to trade it in for forty year old Pacer.

AMC Pacer
AMC Pacer

.

American policy makers often draw a sharp distinction between what the historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom has termed “big bad China and the good Chinese people,” stressing that today’s more hawkish China policy is directed against the CCP and not the ordinary people who “dream of freedom.” 

Yet China contains multitudes — not just dissidents, democrats, and  human rights defenders — and many Chinese are vocal supporters of their  government.
 Indeed, various multinational opinion surveys consistently find a “high level of regime support”  in China, even after factoring in the possibility that some people hide  their dissatisfaction for fear of political repercussions. In 2014, Pew  Global Research found that a staggering 92% of respondents had “confidence” in their country’s leader, Xi Jinping.

In addition, Trump is a poor, untrustworthy messenger, the optics of the trade war rollout—such as using dubious national security grounds to justify tariffs—have allowed China to plausibly appear a victim of U.S. economic aggression in general and Trump’s bad faith in particular.

This is a universal opinion.

As with the other examples above, the whole U.S.-China trade war situation undermines the voices of those who advocate dealing with the problem through more targeted and effective measures.

Ironically, remaining locked into a trade war with negative spillover effects to other countries, especially allies, potentially pushes them away from the U.S.’s position. Indeed, the U.S. is having difficulty convincing allies—including France and Germany—not to purchase Huawei’s 5G technology, despite the unproved security risks that Washington says they have.

In the end, the consequences of Trump’s poor foreign policy choices go beyond the irony that analysts, pundits, and policymakers are compelled to abjure policy directions that they otherwise support.

Good policy choices need solid execution and messaging to have their intended effects.

Unfortunately, even Trump’s good ideas—increased allied financial commitment to security and defense burden-sharing, extricating the U.S. from some of the messiest and most hopeless aspects of Middle East conflict, and pushing back against Beijing’s violations of trade norms—are undermined by his approach to concretizing policy.

Trump is the anti-Midas—even the gold he accidentally touches turns to dirt. This warps debate about future policy choices and will restrict future options because we will have “tried that before.”

Global nuclear conflict was avoided in 2020 just narrowly. There is no doubt in the halls of MM that that would have been the result of the planned “hot war” in the South China Sea by Trump.

How can you believe anything out of the American media?

So why all this propaganda directed towards Americans that Biden will be “tough on China”?

I have identified numerous reasons.

Keep in mind that the "President" has limited powers and range of abilities. That they are all playing a role and are puppets controlled by higher forces hiding behind the scenes.
  • To convince the donors who funded the Trump campaign, that their investments will not be wasted.
  • To convince the American citizenry to keep on hating China, until a new villain can be established, and the anger and disgust siphoned away and redirected towards it.
  • To keep Wall Street positive and in the black.

And my thoughts on the media narrative…

While limited war, using nuclear weapons, was avoided. The (8 +1) bio-weapon assaults were not, and the globe is now dealing with the spillover from the bio-weapons attacks on China by the Trump administration.

Give trump a chance.
Well, I’m still glad that we gave Trump a chance.

.

That being said, MM anticipates a Biden Presidency to right some wrongs and correct some of the damage that the Trump administration inflicted on the global stage. But it will not be complete. There is much that remains raw and that will boil and fester into other issues down the road in the future.

Trump has completed his role. He has successfully isolated America from the global stage, and much of the internal discord and turmoil that will occur in the next five years will be geographically limited to the North American continent.

Biden can do anything, but I anticipate a redirection of hostilities towards Russia. This is a very dangerous turn of events. But if you know the whole and real story it makes sense.

Were Trump to actually successfully enact a “hot war” with China, it would have been a Waterloo moment (for America) with a minimum of three aircraft carrier groups sinking in internal Chernobyl fires, and uncountable submarines as well.

At that, you can pretty much expect a limited nuclear response and all of the top 20 largest American cities would be in radioactive ruins today. New York, Washington, LA, Chicago, Houston, Boston, San Francisco… all would be gone.

But this world-line did not run this way, did it?

Now…

You can say “phew” and wipe your forehead. Yay!

But…

…like I have stated in regards to [1] start, [2] end and [3] signposts on a person’s lifeline, the same is true for groups of people and societies. The end of the USA was not prevented.

It was only postponed.

Postponed.
Things were only postponed.

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The Popular Music of China; Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing – Part 5E

Continuing on this discussion, let’s look at the environment where the music is played; the venue.

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.

China is a nation of skyscrapers, huge public works and enormous constructions. Cities the size of New York City are considered to be “small” communities. When the Chinese live in the cities, they often live in the huge towers that dominate the skyline. Living in these structures can be just simply amazing.

With this understood, let’s have a look at what it is like.

Life in a Chinese Apartment…

For those of you who haven’t a clue, this chick is in an apartment located in Shanghai. You can see the towers in the distance and the Pearl Tower off to the left. This is pretty much what it looks like if you live in Shanghai, China. All the buildings are tall, and most of the views are spectacular.

The song that is played in the micro-video, is of course Chinese Pop, and I personally think that it fits the venue. Shanghai is a Westernized Chinese city. In my mind the way that you can tell if a city is Westernized is by the prevalence of Western restaurants, as well as a rather high cost of living to live there.

Speaking of Shanghai…

American hotdogs
American style hotdogs. You know what goes great with hotdogs? Yup, a good frosty and icy beer. Beer and hotdogs always goes great together.

Being Shanghai, you can get real American food there. For instance, you can get real American hotdogs. They look and taste like the real thing. The only thing is that they aren’t cooked properly. I like them cooked over an open flame outside in the campfire until they are blackened.

You can get all kinds of authentic, or near-authentic American food. Food, mind you, that is pretty difficult to obtain outside of the country. Do youse guys have any idea just how difficult it is to get a decent omelet in China? Well, it’s not easy, I’ll tell you what.

Store that makes American Hotdogs.
Here you can get American hotdogs and Holy Fries. Wouldn’t you want to have some Holy fries? I would. You go inside, and of course you can have a beer with the hotdogs. You do realize that you can by alcohol everywhere in China. You can have a beer with your Big Mac, or have one with your ice cream at Dairy Queen. It’s pretty cool.

Life in Guangzhou

Here in the next micro-video we can look at the view of a different girl. She is listening to Blackpink which has taken China by storm and is dancing on the deck of her apartment. The view is also pretty much typical. It’s not so urban, but awesome never the less.

This is what the South East portion of China pretty much looks like. If you are near the industrial areas, the sky is pretty much white, it turns blue from time to time, but those factories gotta keep churning.

It reminds me a lot of San Antonio, Texas.

You even can go to a Texas bar in Guangzhou. It is almost like the real thing. You can drink real American beer and whiskey there and listen to Country and Western music as well. It’s all pretty amazing. If you close your eyes, you can almost imagine that you are back home.

But, I’ve got to tell ya, their accents are just atrocious.

American themed bar.
Texas themed bar located in China. You can drink PBR, Coors and Bud there. They really should get some Slippery Rock,
Genesee Cream Ale , Iron City beer there, but that is just me.

Speaking of Texas…

You know what I haven’t had in a while? A Whataburger. That’s what. These are the most awesome hamburgers that I used to get when I lived in Texas. I don’t know what they did, but they had this special sauce that they would put on the burgers that made them particularly awesome.

Whataburger
Whataburger is an American privately held regional fast food restaurant chain, headquartered and based in San Antonio, Texas, that specializes in hamburgers.The company, founded by Harmon Dobson and Paul Burton, opened its first restaurant in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1950.The chain is owned and operated by the Dobson family, along with 25 franchisees as of April 2012.

Anyways… I’m sorry about all this.

When I get to thinking of hamburgers and then I get to thinking about icy cold beer, and then singing and friends. It’s been a while since I was in Texas to to enjoy this, and while I do enjoy China, I do get home-sick from time to time. I guess, I’m gonna have to put my foot down and get back to the subject at hand.

Texas boots
I do miss my old boots when I lived in Texas. I would wear them everywhere, that and my hat. I had this awesome black hat. I sure do miss it.

This next girl is exercising in a gym. Like many of the gyms in the United States, they play music to exercise to. Physical fitness is important and a fundamental part of the Chinese culture. It is one of the reasons why the older Chinese tends to live longer than their American equivalents.

Exercising in China

Here, the gal is exercising in the gym and the song that is playing is pretty much typical. I can attest that this song is great to do pushups to and arm curls. Just watching her makes me want to do a set of reps, I’ll tell you what.

I have discussed how the Chinese government has provided venues for people to dance in public, and how they have addressed the rising issue with weight gain. I have discussed how they implemented dancing as part of the exercise routines in schools, well here is how they implement club and house music in exercise gyms….

And here’s another gal doing pushups. She is in a different gym. The thing about gyms in China is that they do not have air conditioning. The idea is to sweat out the bad water, and replenish yourself with good fresh water.

Shanghai

When I was in High School, the music that we listened to defined our life and our culture. At that time the top song was Peter Frampton’s “Do you feel like we do”. I guess to kids now a days, this song seems silly, but that was what it was like for us.

Car ash tray.
Do you all remember the ash trays in the sides of the cars that we all used to ride? Yup, we would cruse and drink beer and toke in the cars and it was quite glorious.

It was all a kind of relaxed haze. I’ll tell you what. It didn’t matter if you were hanging out with your buddies outside of a gas station, or cruising inside a van, getting high and listening to Boston’s “More than a Feeling”. That was what it was like.

That is true for the generation of kids today.

Maybe you all were into grunge back in the 1990’s and listening to Stone Temple Pilots and Plush, or Pearl Jam, Sound garden, and Nirvana. That music defined your life at the time.

Growing up in Middle School, we listened to Alice Cooper, Deep Purple and of course Led Zeppelin. We used to have these square dances that all the girls would come and get us boys to dance with them. I loved doing it. That continued for a spell until some religious fanatic got it terminated because of some obscure rule in the Bible or some such thing.

Square dancing
Square dancing in Middle and elementary school was a popular event all through the 1970’s. I enjoyed it.

Well, I am in China, and I am trying to give this kind of perception to what it is like being here, and how the Chinese people socialize. So, since Shanghai is a major first-tier city, and it is Western to boot, let’s use that as our frame of reference.

Let’s spend some time chatting about the city of Shanghai for a spell. There are many Americans who really don;t know anything about Shanghai they think that it must be a little like Detroit, or Cleveland. Yet, in reality, it is something else all together.

This is what Shanghai looks like from a window in a business building. The night skyline, most especially from a Shanghai hotel room is absolutely amazing. It really and honestly is.

This is what Shanghai looks like from the plaza in front of the hotels in the central section. this is the street-side view. You can pretty much recognize this as the norm for Shanghai.

The Mood of China

As I have mentioned that music is a reflection of the mood and pace of society at that period of time, let’s look at what the mood is in China. During The Jimmy Carter years, we were listening to “I Robot”, Kraftwerk, and Yes. During the Bill Clinton years, we were listening to STP, and Massive Attack. Here, these videos pretty much sums up what the feeling is in China today…

And…

And…

Chinese Crowd Control

Anyways, you have to hand it to China. They have some great crowd control methods. Don’t ya think?

Let’s move on to the next part of this post…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go back to the start of this series, please go HERE.

Links about China

Dance Craze
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Business KTV
Fake Wine
Fat China
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

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